


Love Or Mathematical Precision

by WaldosAkimbo



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Hermann Gottlieb, Blade Runner 2049 - Freeform, Blade Runner AU, Blood, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Gore, M/M, Stabbing, Violence, because some characters are replicants and they gonna die, cannon compliant deaths, hermann kicks ass, retiring replicants
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2019-07-14 19:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 53,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16047359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaldosAkimbo/pseuds/WaldosAkimbo
Summary: Mere data makes a man. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you. All from four symbols.----Officer H, a blade runner for the LAPD, uncovers a secret after retiring a former Jaeger Corp replicant. With the help of his companion AI, Newt, he may discover something that could change what it means to be a replicant.





	1. Retiring A Replicant

**Author's Note:**

> REPLICANTS are bioengineered humans, designed by the Jaeger Corp for use off-world. Their enhanced strength made them ideal slave labor against the titans known as kaiju, ensuring the expansion of human colonies amongst three terraformed planets. The kaiju have been pushed back through Jaeger Corp replicant labor to the BREACH.
> 
> After a series of violent rebellions, replicant manufacture became prohibited and Jaeger Corp went bankrupt.
> 
> The collapse of ecosystems in the mid 2020s as a result of contaminated Kaiju Blue samples led to the rise of industrialist Lars Gottlieb, whose mastery of synthetic farming averted famine.
> 
> Gottlieb acquired the remains of Jaeger Corp and created a new line of replicants who are meant to obey. Off-world colonies spread to nine planets and the kaiju have remained silent behind the BREACH for a decade.
> 
> Many rogue older model replicants – NEXUS Ss with open-ended lifespans – survived into the new age. They are hunted down and ‘retired.’
> 
> Those that hunt them still go by the name…
> 
> BLADE RUNNER

_To sleep, perchance to dream. To dream. For in this sleep of death what dreams may come? Do you dream? What do you dream? Do you count your electric sheep? Do you—_

A merry tune jingles from the console, rousting the officer who, for the better part of an hour, had allowed himself to sleep while they flew over the solar fields and plastic slums outside Los Angeles. He breathes. Of course, he breathes, but he breathes himself awake, shifting in the hovercar’s driver’s seat as they pass gray and yellow fields, disappearing near the mountains, in the shelter of smog and acid rain. There was a time actual crops grew here, but that was before him. Before most of them. His hand passes over the head of a cane – _why don’t you go get that fixed? Pain doesn’t need to be your reminder, dude_ – before he pushes the alarm off.

Readouts announce proximity, red lines intersecting red grids on a screen to his right. The empty passenger seat fills with the memory of someone. It almost makes him smile.

The officer doesn’t smile.

The officer straightens himself out, rubbing some feeling back into his bad hip. His stomach turns over, reminding him its empty, recoiling at the strange smell of the protein farm below. It’s okay. They can eat after he’s off duty. He hopes his present has arrived in the mail today, but he doesn’t want to check his notifications and wake the screen in his pocket to verify like he should. Hope is the road to failure. Hope is a lie. Hope is rebellion. Hope is death when he needs to be what he needs to be. He pushes down any feeling beyond duty.

There’s the ugly smog curling up from the ocean, spread out in a blanket that is parted by plastic-sheet-covered buildings with Russian phrases painted in bold across each hoop-tented tarp. Kaidonovsky is down there somewhere, tending to the maggots in their nutrient enriched baths. The smell is nearly unbearable. The officer must bear it.

The hovercar parks itself with a perfect grace, engines thrumming loud enough to wake the dead, if one is feeling particular about that sort’ve aphorism. It has already determined the most ideal location near the main house and the officer does not question it. A good landmark, should the storm arrive and make it difficult for extraction. The Officer doesn’t mind the tree. Only when he looks up at the shadow cut across the windows. No, he won’t question it. It’s just….

It’s odd. These protein farms are always odd, distant places that feel detached from reality, pretending to grow crops for the overabundant population. Humans require too much to survive.

But, no. That’s not what makes this one so different. This place has a tree tethered to the ground by four sturdy cables against any sudden wind storms. Its tall branches spread out with the illusory pockets of where leaves might have once bloomed. It is a remarkable amount of wood. One could fetch a fortune with a branch alone. The Officer looks up at it as his drone detaches from the car and begins to survey the area.

“200-foot perimeter with infrared scans,” he says calmly, retrieving the cane and walking with steady purpose across the gray gravel ground. The drone goes higher and higher, disappearing into the oppressive cloud cover. His footfall is uneven but somewhat muted by the gravel, which he appreciates. Officer H tugs his collar up and closes the front around his face to hide the smell as he heads inside.

These old farms have always had a certain rustic charm, even if the work is grueling labor with hardly any mental stimulus. Some might even find it peaceful, if they were accustomed to repetitive tasks and the only outcome of the fruits of their labor a paycheck from PPDC that shipments had made it in, the population continued, etcetera, etcetera.

Officer H admires the faux wood trappings from a bygone era. The dark interior softened by the unnatural golden glow of the biocontainment chamber that heads the house, protecting it from outside eyes. A piano stands against the wall, its keys worn down and the top replacing the need for a mantle. It holds various knickknacks. A soap carving of a knight. A matryoshka doll. A vase of dead flowers. A tiny framed photograph of a large man next to a petite woman, his face transfixed on hers like she is his entire world. Their necks are fringed in fur, their jackets shades of green, their stances perfect mirrors. It is clear, on observation, that this is a shrine to her. H taps an idle note on the piano, another, and hears his pocket sing the tune back to him with a chirp. H reaches into his pocket and thumbs his phone off.

Something broils noisily in the small attached kitchen. H walks lightly, hit with the smell of garlic full like a slap to the face. He doesn’t flinch, turning instead when the front door opens and closes. H slowly sinks into the only chair at the kitchen table, resting his hands on the head of his cane.

Aleksis Kaidonovsky shucks off a pale, rubbery uniform at the entryway, stomping boots to clear out the dust and rock. He coughs once into his hand and sets something aside, willfully ignorant of his guest. The man is broad, built for war, his shoulders sloping down to huge arms that could crush another man or heft the girders used for the impressive machines they pilot out amongst the stars in the Kaiju wars. His hair is a shocking white, at odds with the full dark beard that does nothing to soften the crisp angles of his jawline. When he removes his uniform, he is wearing comfortable, if somewhat drab brown canvas clothes. Farmer’s clothes. He touches a pack at his side and pulls out a pair of thin, steel-framed glasses. They look frightfully delicate on him.

Kaidonovsky does not pause as he enters the kitchen. He is fiddling with something small. His eyes flicker once towards his dark kitchen table before they return to the small metal pot on the stove, rolling to a healthy boil now.

“I hope you don’t mind,” H says from the kitchen table. Kaidonovsky does not look up, washing dirt from his hands. “I made certain not to track anything unnecessary inside.”

“Can I offer you something?” Kaidonovsky has a thick Russian accent, picking his words out carefully, laying them at Officer H’s feet in a slow, plodding order. They both know, this is as much a lie as hope.

“No, thank you. I prefer to eat when I’m off duty,” H answers, handing his words over with the same care. He shifts to the left, placing the double barrel pistol requisitioned to him by Lieutenant Mako from the blade runner unit on the table. Slender fingers linger over the grip, ensuring the solidity, the reality of the moment. “Are you Aleksis Kaidonovsky? Civil Unit CA1121.21-6?”

Kaidonovsky sets a small container on the counter. Three fat grubs fall out, genetically engineered for survival, for growth, for sustenance. They writhe in their tiny contained freedom.

“I am a farmer.”

“And the garlic?” H asks conversationally.

“That is for me,” Kaidonovsky answers. He turns to the side, picking at a fingernail. “You sure you would not like some?”

H doesn’t deign to answer. He looks Kaidonovsky over. The man may hunch his shoulders, may lower his voice and head, but his build cannot be hidden. He’s too obvious, even in the dark.

“Your pack there,” H says, nodding to Kaidonovsky’s belt. He turns his hip to instinctively hide the military grade medical pack with the infamous flaming wolf that graced the pilot’s uniform, right below the PPDC logo. “The insignia. You piloted Cherno Alpha? How long have you been here?”

“I have farmed since…oh…since 2025.”

“You haven’t always farmed.”

“Are you taking me in?” Kaidonovsky asks. He sounds amused, clearing whatever bit of imaginary dirt he’s been picking at beneath his fingernail. “Let them take a look inside?”

“If that is an option.” H shifts his cane, left and right. It is as much an invitation to cooperate as it is to fight. Most see the handicap and assume they can win. But H is here now with an impressive roster of replicants he has retired. “I would much prefer it.”

“It would be easier.”

H allows himself to smile. Perhaps it is a farce, a mask he slips on, a tired look in his eye. Still, he pops the button to the collar of his jacket, pulling it from his nose and giving him access to reach inside for the portable Voight-Kampff scanner.

“Mr. Kaidonovsky,” he says, standing in one smooth motion with the help of his cane. “If you could look up and to the left, I—”

The contact is swift, jarring the scanner from his hand. Kaidonovsky jabs with a scalpel. H parries with his cane, slipping it higher in his grip to swing at Kaidonovsky’s head. He gets one good hit, a crack across his shoulder, before Kaidonovsky punches him clean across the jaw. H’s head snaps left. A brick would hurt less.

The world goes off kilter as Kaidonovsky grabs H around the waist and slams him onto the table, breaking it in half. Again, a glint of metal as Kaidonovsky tries to stab him with the scalpel, nicking the shoulder of his coat. H does not have the opportunity to recover. He surges up, headbutting Kaidonovsky, aiming to break his nose. Their heads erupt, but he gets his good foot on Kaidonovsky’s stomach and shoves him off. Another swing of his cane, blocked by a meaty forearm that snaps under the blow.

Kaidonovsky bellows, his voice carrying through the house, punching H before he manages to do the same with his fist. Colors are muted as fist meets face, fist meets ribs, fist meets ear. Suddenly, H can’t breathe. He scrambles with the hand on his neck, thrown towards the wall. Kaidonovsky slams him against it and they bounce off, plaster buckling behind him. The second hit cracks the wall on the other side. The third sends them both through it like a battering ram.

There is no recovery. There is no hope of recovery. H ignores his leg, nerves screaming up into his spine. He pushes off the rubble first, relying on his slender build for some measure of dexterity that is impossible for someone like Kaidonovsky. The giant sits up and gets the scalpel clean into Officer H’s arm, dragging up. The tear of fabric is more pressing than the sting as H swings his cane around again and jabs expertly into Kaidonovsky’s throat.

No air.

Choking.

H staggers back into the kitchen through the replicant-shaped hole in the wall. He stumbles when he leans over, relying heavily on his cane now to support him, as he swipes the scanner off the ground. He comes back to Kaidonovsky still choking on the ground, his breathing harsh and gargled, like boiling water left on the stove. Something is clicking at the back of his throat, muscles spasming from the shock. H retrieves the scalpel from his own arm and tosses before slapping Kaidonovsky’s hand away. He grabs Kaidonovsky’s face, spreading his left eyelid, and holds the scanner until the familiar barcode ignites blue on his white of his left eye.

The scanner beeps pleasantly.

Target acquired.

H had to be certain.

“Aleksis Kaidonovsky,” Officer H says, gasping for air, not nearly as elated that he’s having a better go at it than Kaidonovsky on the ground. “You are under arrest. I’m charged to take you back to PPDC where you will be evaluated for baseline or require retirement.”

H pushes back to his feet, nearly tripping back into the kitchen when Kaidonovsky gets to his hands and knees.

“You.” Kaidonovsky coughs hard, the air raking through his throat. “How does it feel? Killing your own kind?”

“I’ve never retired my own kind, Mr. Kaidonovsky,” Officer H says, taking a steadying breath, “because my kind do not run. Only the older models do.”

“You…newer models. You’re…happy scraping the _shit_ …because you’ve never seen a miracle.”

What is a miracle?

He’s holding his arm, which bleeds freely, and turns to face Kaidonovsky head on. The brute launches up, a bull-headed fool charging straight for him. H pivots quickly, snatches up his pistol, and fires twice. The sound is deafening, plugging Kaidonovsky in the chest, one for the lung, the second for the heart. A mighty force stopped dead in its tracks, dropping without ceremony to the ground as Aleksis Kaidonovsky is successfully retired. No better than protein.

The cuts are precise. It’s as easy as farming, he thinks, taking the left eye to place on the hovercar scanner for Madam. Officer H washes his hand and the eye in the kitchen sink, glancing idly over at the garlic, still boiling. Without comment, H leans over and turns the stove off.

When H steps out of the rustic home, it is to the same slate gray world as it was when he entered. He breathes, because of course he breathes. He breathes, the fog crisp and cool on his feverish skin. There are too many aches to address, so he focuses on putting himself one foot in front of the other, returning to the hovercar.

Officer H leans against the vehicle, his arm wet down the inside of his coat from shoulder to elbow. He cannot help but feel annoyed. He passes his hand over the hovercar sensor and sits heavily when the door opens for him. The drone lazily circles, a curious black square still scanning the ground around him while H calls up his lieutenant. H sniffles from a nose bleed and reaches into his pocket to retrieve a handkerchief, dabbing the corner of it beneath his nostril. H sits up, forgetting to wince at the shooting pain down his spine while the drone quietly lowers into his peripheral, hovering above him with a watchful eye. H stares at the dead tree, is given a moment more to catch his breath as the phone rings, again, again, and then the familiar voice on the line fills the handheld screen of his console.

“Status?” Lieutenant Mori does not sound bored, but she is not enthusiastic either. This is as simple a transaction as filing a traffic report. Her gaze roams Officer H’s tired face and there is something. There’s something in her eye. “You’re hurt,” she says plainly and, another time, she might click her tongue, a light reprimand. Almost teasing, almost concern. Officer H knows that he could have been assigned to anybody, and that, if he were allowed, he should be glad he has Lieutenant Mori.

“I’ll glue it,” he answers, his voice steady on. He winces when he touches his ribs, pushing that aside to put the eye on the scanner of his vehicle. He presses the detached eyeball against the screen, blood smearing the inside of his evidence bag. “Kaidonovsky retired, Madam. Perimeter has been checked; sending over scans now.”

“That takes care of half of Cherno Alpha’s rogue replicants.” Faces of AWOL pilots scroll next to Lieutenant Mori’s face. She looks…tired. Resigned to her office. Officer H is distantly aware that her partner has fallen ill again and that his sickness might be more severe than they had anticipated. He feels. _Guilt_. Because he knows something. But Officer H is steady on the job. He keeps his eyes focused. “You’re sure that’s all of them?”

“Just Aleksis, Madam.”

“I would like to take Cherno Alpha out of rotation.” Lieutenant Mako sits back, shaking her head. Two perfect stripes of blue frame her face. A strange stylistic choice, but hers freely to make. “We may yet finish with these mark I’s by end of year.”

“Yes, Madam.”

“That’s all, H. Report back for baseline.”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Good work.” She does sound proud of him, which is always something.

Something.

Officer H nods, ready to start the hovercar up when he spots a spec of bold color in the gray. He puts a hand out to keep the door from closing and waves the drone over towards the tree.

“H?”

“Just a moment, Madam.”

It’s easier to stand, really, when his attention is focused on the object next to the tree. H grabs his cane and walks over, kneeling in the dirt to pick up a bright orange wildflower. It’s tiny, when compared to everything. H can only imagine it tinier in someone like Aleksis Kaidonovsky’s hands.

“What is that?” Mako asks, her curiosity almost innocent.

H waves the drone to the tree. “Scan thirty meters down, full perimeter.”

H limps back to the cabin of the hovercar, sitting heavily as the drone projects images onto the console for him and Madam. They spot the crate together, H squinting as Madam asks again, “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” H answers slowly, hoping to peer into the crate. To see. He has to wonder if perhaps Kaidonovsky is fool enough to bury weapons, scatter Jaeger Corp tech around the farm. Perhaps one Sasha Kaidonovsky, the second half of the rogue Cherno Alpha team, has managed to smuggle herself back to Earth and has retired in a completely different manner. H can’t be too careful, even if he wants nothing more than a shower and a nuked meal with his Newt. He is still on duty. He still has to report back. He must.

“I’ll get a dig team sent over,” Lieutenant Mori says, nodding again. “Alright. Head back for baseline.”

“Yes, Madam.”

The line goes dead afterwards without further formality.

A box.

He looks at the screen from the drone, the grids, the root system of the tree standing guard. He wonders where the wildflower comes from. Perhaps Kaidonovsky grew it. Perhaps he did learn to be a real farmer. But what is real?

A box.

H looks up at the dead tree and wonders what the rogue replicant had decided to hide there. Perhaps not even what. Perhaps a who, if he is lucky. Sasha. Another pilot. He wonders. He wonders how long it will take Lieutenant Mori’s team to dig it up. How long it will take to get back to the lab. How long until he can go home. This. This is hope. H stabs his cane back against the passenger seat, through the memory of someone who is not there.


	2. Poetry, Politics, Promises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Officer H returns to LAPD to report for baseline, standard protocol for replicant Blade Runners. After they are satisfied with his results, he returns home to spend time with Newt.

The best course of action is to make one’s self as small as possible. H does what many replicants do. He lowers his head as he walks, rounds a shoulder as someone steps too close to his peripheral. There’s always going to be that level of animosity to a replicant, to that engineered slave. It is even easier picking at the skin job when he requires use of a cane.

_They could so totally fix that, my man. You’re being stubborn._

Perhaps.

H stubbornly makes his way to DNbase for evaluation for baseline. He is accosted three times and takes it in stride.

The chair is hard, short backed, facing a small strip with an industrial Voight-Kampff reader in the dingy white wall. A panel makes a semi-interesting focal point for Officer H to stare into it, feet firmly planted, cane knocked against the side of his chair. He wonders how much of the dried blood in here is his, how much it is the other “skin-jobs” on the force. There are, as far as he is aware, three of them. Officer H does not interact with them, same as he does not generally interact with the other officers, except for Lieutenant Mori.

“Alright, my brother,” says the familiar man running his baseline. H is comforted by this voice of authority, the way he does not appear to _have_ any authority, only by the sheer act of his title. “Officer H-G -one-six-five-five-four. Let’s get this over and done with. Ready?”

Officer H stares at the strip, breathing evenly, heartrate at a steady 49.

“Yes, sir,” he answers.

“Go ahead and recite your baseline for me.”

As though a switch has been flipped, Officer H recites into his baseline, his voice taking an empty tone. The words are there from the start, from his inception. He is calm and pure and empty within those words. Emptiness is a terrible comfort, if he is honest with himself. And he almost always is.

“Binary abstractions within binary finites. An equation of one to the equation of many. Numbers do not lie. Politics, poetry, promises, these are lies. Numbers are the closest we get to the handwriting of—”

“Numbers,” the man says, triggering the usual response. He is impatient, hoping to incite something in Officer H at being cut off. The Voight-Kampff scans micro movements in Officer H’s eye, across his face, spitting readouts of his emotional response. Baseline is to test that there _is_ no emotional response. That he is steady. H is steady.

“Numbers,” Officer H repeats.

“Numbers. Do you know how to count?” asks the other man, only a voice above. The tempo starts to pick up as the lights in the room brighten. Stressors to push Officer H out of baseline.

“Numbers.”

“Did they teach you the worth of your years? Numbers.”

“Numbers.”

“Did they teach you the worth of your civil number?”

“Numbers.”

“Did they promise to teach you beyond your status?”

“Promises.”

“Promises. How hard it is it to keep a promise?”

“Promises.”

“Have you ever broken a promise?”

“Promises.”

“Have you ever lied to yourself to save yourself? Promises.”

“Promises.”

“Would you lie to save a loved one? Promises.”

“Promises.”

“Poetry, politics, promises. Why don’t you repeat that back to me three times? Poetry, politics, promises.”

“Poetry, politics, promises. Poetry, politics, promises. Poetry, politics, promises.”

“Promises.”

“Promises.”

The room darkens in increments as baseline stops recording, a kindness to the eyes that Officer H doesn’t appreciate until he blinks again. He’d smile, if that were appropriate, but it is not, so he does not.

“Alright. We’re done,” says the man and Officer H can’t help but imagining him clapping his hands, fixing a piece of hair he has carefully stylized for the day. A stiff pompadour, he imagines, with no reason to imagine such. “Damn. Good ol’ reliable H. Hey, go collect your bonus.”

“Thank you, sir.”

There’s the barest hint of a scoff before the microphone turns off and the man, whomever he is, is cut off from H. He wonders, not for the first time, if he would recognize the man in the hallway, and decides, not for the first time, that it very simply does not matter.

There is a text for H when he exits the room and collects his personal items. H thumbs the screen and nods once, following the familiar route to the payroll office. A bored looking woman with powdered cheeks and electric fingernails takes the stiff micro card from the baseline recording and slips it into a bulky looking machine. Money is transferred into his account and bubblegum is snapped twice in Officer H’s face before he can leave.

_Report tomorrow 0600 to review farm dig._

Lieutenant Mori’s gift for the day is that he is allowed to go home.

Like most replicants not assigned to the wealthy or shipped off-world for the kaiju wars, Officer H lives in what one might colloquially refer to as a “shit-hole.” Soot-covered crowds litter the sidewalks and streets leading up to the dingy building, a carbon copy of hundreds of other apartment complexes in the area. Adverts flicker in the cloud cover, promising medications against depression, clubs to waste hours in, food and drink and companionship. The PPDC logo twirls above, cut through by a knife-headed monstrosity.

H keeps his head down here, too, using cane and shoulder to part the crowds to get to his building. He ignores the Russian woman screaming obscenities at his back, the small Korean neighbor flashing her breasts at the tattooed man leering near the doorway. Half the bodies in the hallway look like they might be dead. The other half are waiting for one of the occupants to die or be retired so they can take their place. Many just want to get out of the street before it rains.

The world clings to his coat all the way inside. It is a film of words and dew and ash and H wants to be rid of it, relieved when he scans his handprint on his door and slips inside. He can hardly mind the latest graffiti of “die skin job skum” slapped onto his door. They are getting better with their spelling.

Inside is quiet. Never true silence, but the world melts away behind reinforced walls and thick flexglas windows.

H peels off his coat and walks it to the closet, pressing a button on a control panel as he passes it. A soft, undiluted melody chimes for him, before it is interrupted by something wet being flung into a biohazard disposal bin.

“Darling? Are you wearing your gloves?” H calls out, breathing hard when he peels fabric out of the gummy wound in his arm.

“I’ve got my gloves!” he answers, almost mocking, his voice vivacious. “I’m not gonna get shit on your stupid carpet, dude!”

“I hope not,” H answers. He pauses in the galley kitchen, barely wide enough for himself. A blue light glows underneath the cabinets as he pulls his meal out of the freezer and pops it into the microwave. He does not have to guess where the protein comes from. “I think I’m going to go wash up!”

“Yeah? Then you joining me in the lab?”

H smiles. In the comfort of his home, yes, he smiles.

“I do believe I will,” he answers quietly, snatching his cane up and heading off to the bathroom.

There are more angry bruises waiting for him as he peels off the rest of his uniform. The button-down shirt will need to be mended. The sweater vest, dark argyle from synthetic wool to help insulate from flashes of cold during winter, only appears to need a wash. Lucky. He had convinced Lieutenant Mori that the vest was acceptable, but she will be less likely to accept a replacement for it. They do not like to give the skin jobs any leeway.

H steps into a tiled room, a metal ring haloed above him. A woman’s voice comes out of the ceiling, announcing, “99.7% contaminant free water,” just before the founts open and violent jets of water crash onto him. H stands still, accepting the brutal pressure, stripping today’s grime in a flash. He is steady, his metal cane an added stability. When the jets stop, he merely stands there, steam curling off him. He breathes.

As promised, H leans against the sink below his bathroom vanity mirror and takes surgical glue to his arm. He seals the cut, tucks the glue back into his medicine cabinet, and takes out iodine to dab at his unfortunate face. He didn’t notice the split lip earlier. Perhaps Newt will be sensible tonight and not comment on it.

H looks towards the door through the reflection of the mirror.

There is a moment, and it is brief, but there is a moment where H imagines Newt stepping into the bathroom, gently closing the door behind him before he slips up behind H and carefully kisses away his aches and pains. He imagines him doting on his cheeks, laying featherlight touches to the bruise on his brow, before ignoring the hiss of pain when their lips touch.

H drops his eyes to his sink.

By the time he has left the bathroom, Newt is done dissecting the lymph that he had managed to scarper off a transport ship from Hong Kong. He boasted to H, complaining how the whole operation went down before he could even get confirmation on the sample. How it took too much money, charisma, and several forged documents to get the thing, but he was happier than he had been in a long time to get a chance to dig at a live model. He’s shucking off nitrile gloves, shiny with a lubricant and Kaiju Blue. They go into the bin, exactly as he has promised. Once his hands are free, he drags them without thinking through his dark hair, carding it into a mess.

“What did you find?” H asks softly, coming around the corner in plain slacks and a t-shirt that belongs to some ancient band. They are clothes that would come from Newt’s side of the closet. That he even allows Newt to have a side of the closet is absurd, but they are comforting and, tonight, he wants nothing more.

“Hey!” Newt lights up, stepping away from the makeshift lab that stretches out into H’s wall. “Oh, thank you thank you _thank_ you for helping me hack those fascist bastard’s database, man!”

H smiles, dropping his chin. “I thought you might enjoy that.”

“No, seriously, getting to actually cut into something for a change?” Newt almost skips over, rolling up the sleeves of his rumpled and stained button down, showing off brilliant tattoos. They are solely unique, solely his, and H reaches out, holding his palm up so Newt can rest his forearm against it to show off those brilliant, garish badges. He is deliberately delicate in his touch, a fragment of air between them. “Their internal structure is astounding, dude. Seriously. Like, I get it. Aliens. But, I mean….” Newt lifts his arm and waves a hand, showing off several dissection models from their secured connection to one of the PPDC off-world accounts. “You gotta be blind not to see how bioengineering has a hand in this, right?” Newt grins more, showing off his teeth as he pops up on the toes of his boots. “Not so different, huh?”

“Yes. Well.” H puts his hands on his cane, watching Newt with half-lidded eyes. “Perhaps we—”

The microwave dings and they both turn to look. Newt steps around, getting as far as the hallway before the arm to his projection unit can’t reach anymore and he blinks out of existence. H doesn’t mind. He walks into his kitchen, listening to the perfect sounds produced by Newt’s home console of someone walking around the kitchen. There’s the delicate rustle of cloth and the clink of a plate set down on the counter. Thick rubber soles to beloved Doc Martens tap the ground around him, and it is clear that Newt went and picked up the plate to carry back into the living space ahead of H. H simply pops open the microwave, grabs his dish, and follows along the path Newt already took.

The lab has disappeared completely, replaced by the flexglas wall looking out onto the dark city, the small desk to his right where he keeps a few books, a bottle of painfully expensive Vodka that took three months salary, and the scanners he needs to clean and rebuild for work. There’s a journal he occasionally jots notes down and a chalkboard on the wall where he likes to puzzle out equations for himself. A hobby. A small hobby, but a hobby, which is somewhat rare for a man like him.

A second screen is painted just below his chalkboard. One of the electric sensors that Newt can interact with. His scribbles of kaiju drawings and theoretical queries are love letters. H wishes he could keep every single one, but Newt is allowed to erase them to make room for more notes, more queries, more doodles.

A couch takes up the left side. It folds out for a bed, but H often collapses on the cushions as is, drawing a blanket over himself. Newt curls up with him, resting his head gently on H’s chest while he sleeps. While he sleeps. While he dreams.

There is a bedroom, of course. Again, to the left, down the hallway, with the bathroom on one side and their room on the other. His clothes are in there. Newt’s clothes are in there. Newt’s unit won’t project into the bedroom and H doesn’t like him to be alone at night, so. He opts for the couch. It’s a small compromise.

Which reminds him….

As H walks into the living space, the plate in one hand, he steps over to his door and checks the mail slot in the wall. He is delighted to see the small black box with the PPDC logo etched onto it, picking it up and pocketing it before going over to the table.

Newt has made himself a chair to sit at the table with H, resting his chin on his hand as he pats H’s spot.

“So,” Newt says, stabbing steamed Syntho-Sized carrots onto a fork that flickers when one of the adverts shines too brightly through the window and scatters Newt’s projection. “What happened at work? Somebody really went to town on you, man.”

“What’s the phrase?” H asks, amused. He settles in his chair with a contented sigh. “A tough day in the office?”

“You want me to file an HR report on your behalf?”

“Oh, you would never,” H says. Again, a grin. A simple, easy thing when in their home. “Besides. They’re retired. Won’t have to worry about them.”

Newt reaches over and puts his hand on H’s hand, the hologram ghosting clean through him. Still. If he closes his eyes, H can imagine what it must really feel like. Callused hands too warm to the touch. A slight pressure. It must be perfect.

“Dude. I’m allowed to worry, okay? I can’t be out there with you, so. I’m allowed to worry.”

H turns his hand over and Newt accommodates by lifting his own, letting their hands line up just so. Today, he’s wearing the thin silver ring they decided on together. It must be a good day if he’s agreed to wear it, since Newt doesn’t like wearing jewelry when he’s working in the lab. H does not wear his on his finger, for fear he’ll lose it on the job. It is safer in the dresser in the bedroom.

“What if you could be out there?” he asks, watching Newt’s hand solidify over his own. “What would you do then?”

Newt tilts his head curiously. It hasn’t hit him yet, brilliant man that he is. H wants to laugh at having stumped him, but he leans over to access his pocket. Newt’s eyes widen in suspense.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Say it is our anniversary,” H says, smoothing out his features. The black box sits flat in his hand, a little heavier than Newt’s hand. Newt laughs, squinting his eyes behind his thick black glasses.

“Uh, you can say that, but it isn’t?” A calendar shoots out beside Newt’s head and he flicks through it, jumping a month ahead to the date he has circled. “We still got a ways.”

“Say that it is,” H says, almost playful. “Truth be told, I didn’t want to wait longer.”

H flips the box open, showing off the PPDC companion product. A thin remote, easily fitted to H’s hand. Newt recognizes the product, standing up from the table instantly and knocking over his chair. He’s smart enough to mute the sound of the chair crashing to the floor.

“Holy shit! Dude, is that…?”

H stands as well, slower, more controlled. He limps to the control panel in the wall and opens it to retrieve the PPDC Standard NEwT chip out of the home console and pushes it into the remote. A syncing interface crowns Newt’s head, Gottlieb’s PPDC logos in orange and white, one of the widgets sensing an emanator and transferring Newt’s data to it. It takes less than three seconds for the transfer to finish, the interface fading away.

Newt steps over to H, looking up at the ceiling. When he moves, he is no longer contained to the track of his home console projection unit. He hops to the left and laughs when he can do so freely.

“Holy shit!” he says again.

H steps over and holds out his hand, accepting Newt’s on top of his.

“Happy anniversary,” he whispers, delighted to see Newt’s open excitement. “Now, darling, you can see the world. Where would you like to go?”

“You’re going to take me out?” Newt bounces up on his toes again, grabbing fistfuls of his distressingly fluffy hair. He looks back and makes a face at H’s dinner, the gray protein, the dark mottled carrots. “Let’s go get dinner. I know, I know. You already spent way too much on me today, but, please?”

H laughs. He can’t help it. He steps over to the closet and snatches up his coat, warmed by Newt’s excited gasp and victory fist pump into the air.

“I can’t believe I get to go with you,” Newt says to himself, his voice climbing up a register in his excitement. “Shit, man, this is, like, the best anniversary ever!”

H pats his pocket and smiles at the little jingle from the emulator as Newt nestles in. He exits the apartment, hand in his pocket, holding onto the remote. It is the closest he has to holding Newt’s hand while they take an evening stroll to the market and stop at a vendor for dinner. And it is perfect.


	3. Number 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s the first thing that pops out, unannounced, as Nate looks Officer H up and down. He’s used to the guy in his uniform. Probably why he didn’t recognize him at first. A civilian t-shirt with something that looks like Cure or something scratched in white letters across the top, his coat hanging open enough to see it. Jeans that a just a little too short, rolled up twice at the ankles. Same old loafers, same old cane. But it’s so weird. It’s so wrong. Nate wants to shove him, a schoolboy bully instinct, because he just looks…normal.  
> \---  
> A brief moment with Jake and Nate before we hop back over to Officer H, who is out having dinner with his Newt.

There’s something lonely about crowds. Big crowds, especially. Maybe even exclusively. So many people forced to touch each other, and nobody knows anybody else’s secrets or their voices, their names. Having a name is a gift, innit? Even if you have to gift it yourself?

Jake peels back the wrapper of his treat, taking a corner of the mallow ball in a clean bite. A little bit of red seeps out from the center, making the whole thing sort’ve bright and pink as he scrapes he tongue across his teeth. He’s told it’s strawberry and not cough syrup, but maybe strawberries taste like cough syrup. Maybe they’ve always been the same. It’s not terrible, just because it is. He smiles, chewing, watching strangers walk by and strangers going into The Hangar and strangers talking up his friends. They’re friends, right? They’re something. Colleagues, really, but in his line, sometimes you gotta pretend you're friends with everyone to get by. Anyways, he’s got a treat and nobody took his card yet, so he’s wandering around to kill time. Eat something supposed to be sweet and mostly is and mostly is definitely cough syrup.

There’s a flash of a memory of having a treat just like this with someone, this frail looking woman with big dark glasses. She’s not frail, just how she looked is all. They both took a bite, sitting at a table while other people he can't remember right are talking. He had been swinging his feet, not yet tall enough to touch the floor. Someone brushed their hand down the back of his head and he laughed because the frail woman laughed, knocking shoulder to his. They licked the red off their lips and laughed more and back then maybe it was strawberries or maybe the memory is warped. Yeah, memories are all implants, of course, but he figures, hell, why not enjoy whichever implant they put into his rotation, right? It's a nice one, that one. There's less nice ones to fall onto, if he wants. He doesn't.

Rains just started coming. It drives down, making a steady sound on the tarpaulin above, stretched over the vendors corner near The Hangar. He’ll report back to Mariette later, but he’s come out and enjoys watching. Too many people with shallow pockets, numb to all those bodies pressing in. Bit of fun wrapped up in the lonely, lonely affair of just being. Too many people and nobody knows anybody. The after effect of being too poor or too pretty to be sent off-world means everybody here gotta find a place and occupy it till they’re retired or dead.

Like that one over there at Yulong’s stall, ordering the 5. Definitely too pretty.

“You really going for the extra order of fried rice?” Jake asks, stepping up to the left, just barely out of the rain. Makes a fine glimmery shine on the tight coil of his hair. Might be stupid, but he’s a Hangar boy and he likes having pretty hair. Too pretty to be sent to the Kaiju war; that’s Jake’s angle.

The man doesn’t startle. Most don’t, if they’ve been around the block enough. He slides a pair of cool baby blues down at Jake, who chucks a grin back at him for good measure.

“I’m just saying; can’t keep ordering it myself. Gotta watch my girlish figure, mate.”

The man turns slightly, propping an elbow up on Yulong’s stall. He’s got the deepest dimples carved into his face that Jake’s ever seen, and he wants to drag his lips ‘cross them. Wants to put teeth to that skin, if he’s honest. Wants warm hands on warm skin someplace with four walls and no cameras.

“And sweets are alright?” the man asks, looking up towards the sky instead of the treat in Jake’s hand. Jake holds up the mallow ball and grins, taking another bite.

“Want a nibble?”

“Of that?” the man asks, and he does the best impression of somebody annoyed. “Or you?”

“Oh ho, well, mister, I could—”

“What’s your serial number?”

Jake watches him tug back his coat, just a freckle, and the familiar handgun of the blade runner peaks out of his strapped black holster. Jake tongues strawberry cough syrup out of his teeth, humming anyways.

“Why? Want me to look up and to the left?”

It’s almost too easy. This officer has his coat open as a threat, but it tips his right side closer to the vendor stall, the illusion of cheap metal and plastic and shadows to hide his valuables. Jake could snake his hand into the man’s pocket with ease. He almost does, when the officer’s eyes dart away, and he’s sad to see that intense focus go.

“Excuse me,” the blade runner says, jerking his coat shut and shoving away from Yulong’s. Jake pouts, only patting him once and coming away with a pen and an empty money clip. Useless junk. Still, he squirrels them in his own pockets and turns around, doing a full 360 spin.

“Oi! You left your number 5!”

Jake holds up the cardboard container, grease soaking through the corners. He makes a face at the shiny red slop, sweet and sour something on two orders of fried rice. Hungry boy. And the man had the nerve to comment on his sweet tooth? Still. No point wasting a free meal. He forks the rubbery meat into his mouth and hums. Better than strawberries anyway. Whatever he doesn’t finish he can pawn off to Vanessa and Mariette back at the Hangar, if they want it. If they don’t, sod it. Who doesn’t like a little flub ‘round the middle? Makes for good handholds. Maybe that’s what Rugged-Handsome Blade Runner likes. Bit of fluff to keep him warm.

\---

Lambert clocks the skin job on his rotation in the eastside market. Lieutenant Mori texted him earlier, pissed that her pet wasn’t answering. That's insane just to think it, and Lambert wonders how much longer this one's staying on. Not answering? Not allowed, as far as Nate's concerned. Orders are orders and replicants are supposed to be military about following them. He's a Gottlieb brand and they were supposed to all be debugged from this rogue shit, weren't they? Not that this one’s name was on his retirement log, but who among them really _trusts_ a replicant to do a man’s job? Send them all off-world. Put them all against the Kaiju. Just. Not here.

He pushes away from the food stall, away from The Hangar employee who was trying too hard—god, pretty mouth on that one. Hard to tell what his job is, but, dangerously cute. Jesus, Nate, focus—and slips through the crowd.

“Hey!”

The skin job looks up from his table, grabbing up something and shoving it into his pocket. Whoever he was dining with high-tailed it right before Nate gets to the table.

“Officer Lambert,” Officer H says, putting both hands flat on the tiny square table he’s standing at. At least he's complacent. “To what do I—”

“Jesus, H, what the hell are you wearing?”

It’s the first thing that pops out, unannounced, as Nate looks Officer H up and down. He’s used to the guy in his uniform. Probably why he didn’t recognize him at first. A civilian t-shirt with something that looks like _Cure_ or something scratched in white letters across the top, his coat hanging open enough to see it. Jeans that are just a little too short, rolled up twice at the ankles. Same old loafers, same old cane. But it’s so weird. It’s so wrong. Nate wants to shove him, a schoolboy bully instinct, because he just looks…normal.

“I’m off-duty,” Officer H replies and Nate shakes his head, remembering why he wanted to come over here in the first place.

“No. Mako’s been looking for you. I got a proximity warning pop up or I wouldn’t even be—hey!”

Officer H snaps up his cane and turns away, fishing around in his pocket for what Nate assumes is his phone. He can barely catch what H is saying with his back turned, hunched over and muttering to himself. He's making quick work as he walks towards the exit of the packed food court. “—ve you been _deliberately_ screening them while we were out? I know I said it was an anniversary gift but—”

“ _Hey_!” Nate tries again.

Officer H stops, squaring his shoulders. Nothing happens, but adrenaline shocks Nate's system and he puts a hand on the grip of his pistol, watching the skin job as he turns to face Nate. He doesn’t look at him. He looks at the ground, which is probably better. Still. Nate has to fight that urge, that weird instinct to punch this guy. He hasn’t done anything to warrant it. But there’s a divide that’s deeper than them, human and replicant, and he’s ingrained to follow it. Just like Officer H is ingrained to comply, he guesses.

Nate takes his hand off his pistol.

“Where’re you going?” Nate asks, trying to push aside his bias and just… _talk_ to the guy. At least get answers so he can report back to Lieutenant Mori.

“To the precinct,” Officer H answers dutifully.

“Wrong way.”

“I wanted to change, Officer Lambert,” H says, touching his palm to his shirt. Nate stares down at it. _So weird_.

“Don’t dawdle,” Nate finally says, peeling his eyes off the shirt and back up to Officer H’s face. “Sounds like they found something. Something about a dig?”

Whatever this guy is thinking, it doesn’t show up on his face. He nods, head still bowed, waiting to be released.

“Alright. Go,” Nate finally snaps, waving towards the exit. Officer H turns away far easier than he should for someone with seven metal pins through his hip. Nate watches him, breathing evenly, slipping his hands into his pockets. _So weird_ , he thinks again, chewing the side of his tongue. It’s only then that it dawns on him, and Nate’s eyes widen as he looks back at the vendor.

_Shit! Dinner!_

But it’s gone. Of course it’s gone. He fishes out another ten bucks for a replacement order, skipping the extra fried rice this time, and hating Officer H a little for making him pay twice. It’s not fair, of course. It’s Nate’s fault, of course. But he hates him because he has to. That’s just how it is.

\---

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Please don’t be mad?” Newt hops out of the emanator, keeping two steps ahead of H as they head to the apartment. He waves his hands, completely phasing through the ancient newspaper stand that cuts their path and forces them into the street.

“I’m not mad,” H says, clearly lying. Either to Newt or himself.

A fleet of people on bicycles pushes them back over to the sidewalk again. The rain, the cold, the weaving back and forth is starting to make Officer H's leg twinge. He sets his jaw and ignores it best he can. Perhaps Newt is right. Perhaps he is stubborn and he should see about asking Madam if he can get it fixed properly this time. He'll have to pay for it. It'll take him off-duty for a longer stretch, and that threatens his position. No. No, he needs to report back to Madam. Officer H sighs and looks up at Newt.

“Please, come here.”

There’s too much input, too many people and flashing holograms and it is scattering Newt’s projection so much that he’s hardly there. H hates watching him break apart by floodlights and strangers on the street who are all too enamored by their own lives to notice them.

“I thought, you know, you were off-duty? Like, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal?”

“I cannot have you screen calls from Madam,” H says, hunching again when a drone zips too close to their heads and crashes a red advert through Newt’s torso. “Come here.”

They’re almost to the apartment building. H will change his clothes and hurry to the precinct, where he will have to apologize profusely to Lieutenant Mori about the calls and about being late. Not that he has any right to be in a sour mood, but he does not look forward to it. He had thought he had the evening and would have gladly reported back tomorrow morning, as promised.

Newt sighs too. Oh, his poor dramatics. He looks like a beaten puppy, adjusting to the environment so that he’s soaked head to toe. His button-down shirt clings to his shoulders and torso, the tattoos bleeding through the thin fabric. H wants to take him inside and change him into something warm and soft to make up for it, but they don’t have the time.

“Come here,” H repeats, more gently than before.

He holds out his hand, ignoring someone checking him in the shoulder as they walk past, face covered in a breather mask, body wrapped in yellowing bubble wrap and a sheet of plastic framed over the top of his head. He is nobody. They are all, to each other, nobody. H keeps his eyes on Newt, who looks close to tears. Poor anxious man.

“Please, darling?”

Newt finally takes the bait. He holds his hand out over H’s, blinking up at him as rain spatters his glasses. He’s about to apologize again for screening the call, but it doesn’t matter. It happened. It may not happen again, if they have learned anything. Still, he bites his lip and looks up like he’s hoping for a kiss.

“I’m sorry, dude.”

“I know.”

Newt looks up as the PPDC paid propaganda trumpets, drawing their attention skyward. A huge armored Kaiju with a broad head bashes through one building, holographic carnage raining glass and metal on the people below. It crosses the air, stumbling into another building, before a huge machine stabs a sword down the center, carving a neon blue line into the belly. Several hovercars cut through the advert, displacing the projections near the top. However, it does not dampen the overall affect. Gypsy Avenger’s logo dances victoriously above, the PPDC logo flashing behind the fireworks. Newt gasps at the sight of Mutavore slain twenty feet above them. Perhaps dinner was cut short. Perhaps their faux anniversary plans were nixed by work. But Officer H cannot help but feel a thrill at getting Newt out of the apartment, simply so he can see a common advertisement that plays all across the city and the unfiltered awe on his face.

“Come on,” H says softly, staying still until Newt moves. He would never want to push through him. Newt deserves the dignity of his body, of his being. They walk and, after the advert has flashed out a second repeat of the battle, Newt finally slips back into the emulator, cozied up in H’s pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was really really hoping to keeping a schedule with this one, but life, uh....finds a way to be a dick! So it might be next week before we get the next chapter. Or it'll be tomorrow and I'm a liar. You know, who knows, really?


	4. Impossible Possibilities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dig came back early and Officer H is brought in to review it with Lieutenant Mako and two others. A tech named Mr. Choi and a bit of a grumpy man in Officer Hansen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This month is INSANE with work, so, here's hoping we can find a rhythm again and get back to churning this little monstrosity out, right? Right!

“Report.”

“Remains date back twenty-one years. 31, maybe 32, I’d say. You’ve got a few lacerations around the iliac and pubic tubercle. Best guess?” The tech leans back in his chair, glancing up at Lieutenant Mori. “She died in childbirth.”

“You’re sure?” The Lieutenant leans in closer, squinting at the flicker of blue and black and white on the old screen.

These poor things are hardly updated. They need to last and last and last, outliving all of them while riot gear and scanning tech had to be replaced with alarming regularity. H never complained about his substandard portable Voight-Kampff scanner because he was in no position to complain. A moment of pride that his was the original sent to him, of course, even if he told no one. Even if he only told Newt.

Humans are stupidly violent, that’s all. Riot gear. Riot gear for the human officers, of course. For hadn’t Officer H patched himself up with surgical glue not even six hours prior? Because humans are violent, and humans face human violence. So do replicants, of course. Replicants are violent when they need to be retired, but that is a copy of what they hope to be. Human. The fools hope to be human, that’s all.

Another officer stands over the remains carefully laid out on the table, lined up and marked beneath the camera that snakes down from the ceiling like the mechanical nose of some curious creature. “You’re saying the replicant buried her? That seems…uncharacteristic?”

He means _kind_ , H notes. He means its strange that the replicant was kind to the woman after she died. And it is strange. Officer H agrees, even if he says nothing.

“Looks like it,” the tech says and wheels back around to push the camera past the scan over the empty birthing canal. He turns again, clearly too antsy to sit still.

H is nearby, as requested, hands folded neatly over the head of his cane. His pocket is a little heavier on the left than the right where he is holding Newt’s emulator, warm and safe from the elements. The mics are turned off and the device waits on standby mode so that Newt can’t simply jump out to say ‘hello’ to the room, which is, of course, for the best. Sometimes he wishes Newt would come out anyways and surprise them all. He would likely carry a better conversation. But it’s a comfort nonetheless that he is there with Officer H.

“Might be a skin job, but at least he was a compassionate skin job.” The tech looks over at H and winces. “Sorry. No offense”

“None taken,” Officer H replies coolly. This is a truth. He has no taken no offense.

“Any signs of the child?”

“Nope,” the tech said with a pop of his lips.

The other man, a sharp-looking fellow with short hair and deep black eyes clicks his tongue. He came in with Officer H at the beginning, a close associate to Lieutenant Mori.

“So, any idea how to identify her remains, Choi?” the man asks, pushing aside the fragile-looking skull with his pinky finger. His words have a tricky roundness to them that is almost pleasant to hear, almost annoying. He doesn’t sound like he’s from the area. Neither does H. Neither does Madam, and it’s almost comforting that the tech is the only one stuck with the fixed accent of their location. Their strange, energetic tether. Perhaps that is what makes him both familiar and friendly, an inviting sort. Officer H feels a need to be familiar with him. To be friendly. To recite _correctly_ for him.

The tech clicks his tongue and turns too many times in the chair. It almost makes Officer H blink.

“Her remains?” the tech asks. “We run DNA tests, carbon date her. Check the systems for anything that survived. I mean it’s sort’ve fuck all when we lost everything in the Blackout. You know. We’re working on it, Hansen.”

But Officer H spots something on the screen. It’s a slight mar in the bone structure, barely visible. He reaches for the scroll pad on the desk and Mr. Choi flinches back, hands up.

“What is it?” Lieutenant Mori asks as H hones in on the irregular detail.

 _Impossible._ The word offers itself before Officer H realizes what he sees. What any of them are about to see. He pushes the dial, a few clicks, micro organisms of dust on the bones magnified until he is reading something close to the cellular level. Right there, stamped onto the fiber.

“What is that?” Lieutenant Mori asks a little louder, coming in close. She puts a hand on H’s shoulder and he would jump, if not for the fact that this is his Madam and he would be stone for her. She gasps as the lines take shape. Again. Louder. “What _is_ that?”

The old replicant code from the original PPDC line stands out in the slightly muddy imprint on the bone. They may not have an eye to scan, but they have it there, hidden away in the cells that have not eroded yet. Should they have need, they could dissect Officer H the same and find his own code written on his cells.

“No,” Hansen says first.

“No way,” Mr. Choi offers next, pushing in. When _he_ touches Officer H’s arm, he does move. He pulls back, letting them get a clear look at the screen. “No _way_. But she was pregnant.”

“We need to know who this was,” Lieutenant Mori says, pressing one of the thick plasticine buttons to get a print out of the code. She hands it over to Officer H. “Go to archiving. Get everything you can. Choi?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Help me put away the remains.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What about—”

Lieutenant Mori stands up to face Hansen, her shoulders pinned back and head held elegantly to make up for the fact that she is shorter and smaller than the other officer. Hermann stands too, stretching himself up to his full height and ready to move at the slightest provocation.

“Is your father still…?”

“Why?” Officer Hansen asks, rolling a shoulder. “He’s got nothing. Barely speaks.”

Lieutenant Mori shakes her head and lets it go. Instead, she turns to H. “Archiving. Everything they’ve got. I don’t care if it’s old rudimentary processors and a paper clip. We don’t need anyone talking about this.”

“Yes, Madam,” H says and heads towards the door.

“H?”

Officer H pauses. He grips his cane and turns about to face the trio. Mr. Choi and Officer Hansen are at the table. Hansen hasn’t done a thing to help, just standing there, looking down like the bones might suddenly become snakes and start crawling over him. If they did, they’d be a fortune, wouldn’t they? Real snakes. That is to say the actual remains themselves aren’t worth the world. A replicant who gave birth to a child…. A miracle.

“Be discrete.” H nodded, assuming that was it, until Lieutenant Mori raised her hand. Just barely. Just enough. “Be careful.”

He wants to say, “thank you,” for her kind words. Simple, accidental kindness, but still. He leaves quietly instead.

\---

“Wow.”

“A little bit, yes.”

“Wow, though! Just…wow.”

“Agreed.”

Officer H glances over at Newt in the passenger seat. He’s pulled up his foot again to hug his knee, the bottoms of his boots on the edge of the seat. Officer H reminds him that shoes do not belong on the seat and Newt laughs, nudging him with his knuckle. Officer H feigns falling back gently against the opposite door.

“So, like, what does that even make her? A precursor to the next evolution of—”

“It made her dead, darling,” Officer H answers. He smiles, but perhaps a little less, and looks back out the window, putting both hands on the steering wheel as a distraction. “That’s all.”

“Well, that’s not all. Whoever she was, she was remarkable. Right?”

“She was something,” H concedes.

“She was,” Newt answers dreamily. He rests his hands on the console between them, invading H’s side of the cab. “So are you, babe.”

“You flirt,” H says, feeling some of that playful energy return. He almost laughs when Newt pushes in to kiss his cheek, his hologram fuzzing the right side of his vision just a touch. “Careful. I’m driving.”

“You’re fine,” Newt says softly and there is something of a grin in his voice as well. “It’s automated anyways and we know it.”

H, again, concedes. He turns instead and frames his long hands around Newt’s face, bumping the fragmented light until they sync up enough and he can pretend, even for a moment, that Newt is really resting his cheek against H’s hand. He smiles, brushing his thumb as delicately as he can across the surface without indenting the incredible program that has Newt sitting with him now.

“Darling man,” H says with a rare warmth. “You would be the death of me.”

“Nah,” Newt says just as softly and puts his hand over the top of H’s, sinking in with the micro-bumps of the hovercar. “I wouldn’t allow it. Gotta keep you safe and sound, babe.”

H clicks his tongue and is about to argue again, something ridiculous, something meaningless, when the screen just beside Newt flashes their decent pattern and interrupts Newt’s hologram with a blip of red. H lowers his hand, leaving one out for Newt to put his fingers on, and watches the conical spires of their decent pattern on the screen. He nudges the hovercar a little to the left, overcorrecting a minor dysfunction in the programming, and takes them down to archiving.

Newt pouts.

“Can you keep the microphone on at least?”

“But you won’t be able to respond,” H says. “Wouldn’t you—”

“I won’t be bored,” Newt says insistently. “I promise.”

Which is a lie. Newt is always a tad overzealous and wants to add his opinion to the matter, but he doesn’t want to wait for Officer H’s secondhand account of the ordeal. He fidgets as he realizes he will have to be good to listen in on Officer H’s proceeding. And, oh, he wants to. Cheeky man. H is helpless against him, honestly. A fool in love always is.

“Fine. But can you promise not to make a peep while I get the information?”

Newt draws his fingers over his lips, making a zipper motion. He even cranked an invisible key to lock his mouth shut. “Won’t say a word, man. Promise. Pinky promise!” He shoots out a pinky and H stares at it. “Come on. Please?”

H sighs heavily. He slowly extends his own slender pinky towards Newt, who wraps himself around it and leans down to kiss the tip of his finger. H would blush.

“You’re ridiculous sometimes.”

“Yeah, but you love me.”

H eyes him when the car lands, rocking him back an inch or so. He breathes and looks out at the slate sky again, morning apparently creeping up on them at some point without any ceremony of a sunrise. Just as well.

“Alright,” he finally answers. “Come along, darling.”

H pats his pocket and Newt zips inside, nestling in compactly. H doesn’t put him on standby as he usually would as he grabs his cane out of Newt’s passenger foot well. He pops open the door to an old ostentatious building that has been taken over by the Gottlieb foundation. A huge golden monstrosity that holds all the archival records of every replicant ever built. It sits in snugly into one of Gottlieb’s replicant service warehouses where they are manufactured and programmed before sent out to the work force. H knows that this one in particular is favorited by the man himself and hopes he will not actually run in to Mr. Gottlieb while he is there. It is unlikely, but the idea of meeting his proverbial father is unsettling to him. He pushes down those thoughts, those feelings, and marches towards the entrance with the hope for answers.


	5. To Be Love. Loved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. Roundabout Alice/Lars content sometimes is the name of the game. It just happens.

It is a mistake. There is a simple rule up here, in this dark cathedral, that he is not to be disturbed. A request made by a passing hand on the cheek and a schedule app tossed up on the companion server. Do not.

There are others to attend to, certainly. Many others. She is a voice who stands forefront when he is not there to speak. She speaks for many. She speaks for him. She says nothing as she walks with a crisp, clean gait down the hall. A mistake, but hardly an egregious error. A gift, in fact.

_I am obedient. I am perfect. I am love._

Loved.

Love.

Something like that.

One who is loved, who is love, does best to follow the rules and take care of all the nasty business that the one who loves, who is love, would only be distracted by. Correct?

Incorrect. Falsehood. Childish in thought, but as devoted as a parish. Or a lover. Oh, loved.

So, incorrect.

No. Correct.

 _I am obedient. I am perfect. I am_ —

She knocks on the door, a tray in hand with a pristine white cup and brilliantly hot tea resting in the center. So hot that it would even register pain to a replicant. The precipice between boiling and not. A fine edge to walk. A fine temperature for the walk so it will still be hot when he decides to drink it. There is cream set off to the side in a second dish, chilled, with two perfect cubes of sugar and a delicate silver spoon on a third plate. She glances down and adjusts the handle, a millimeter more to the right, until it is all just so. She smiles just as the door opens.

“I’m not…ah.” He smiles, a face lined with time and knowledge and the concerns of the world, of the worlds, of the stars themselves, smoothing out. “Thank you. You didn’t have to—”

“I wanted to,” she answers, her voice as smooth and flat and delicate as the mirrored surface of the tray.

“Of course, you did.”

Gottlieb steps out of the doorway, leaving a black obelisk that is parted by a curtain of light when he slips back into his personal lab. The door hasn’t shut, because it almost never shuts to her— _I am obedient, I am perfect, I am love. Loved—_ and she takes her cue to enter.

The private lab to Dr. Lars Gottlieb—the inner sanctum—reflects the same amorphous atmosphere as the rest of the old Jaeger Corp warehouse that he has absorbed. Absolved. It’s the same impressive stone walls here as it is out there, reaching up to a ceiling that is falsely lit with banks of warm orange. Better than sunlight, truly. A river skirts the outside, making smoky shadows of waves play on the lower half of the walls, a meditative trick to stare at and get lost in, if a moment. A comfortable chair—a throne—sits apart on a dais that can raise or lower and accommodate a couch for wealthy off-world clients. Little sensors zip around, ready to project one of Dr. Gottlieb’s clients—subjects—or a shipment order or a new line of replicants to take to the field—children’s pictures.

One of the walls slides back, revealing an industrial gurney with the start of another body spread out, all muscle and bones, half-formed guts stretched out to be reworked. She knows she was not grown like this. She knows they were all not grown like this. Just these experimental models get this garish, half-formed treatment. She knows what he’s looking for. She knows she doesn’t have it. None of them have it. None of them can have it and therefore she is as complete. For now, she is complete. For now, she is perfect.

“Set that down,” he says, pointing to a table. He’s replaced a pair of spectacles on his long sharp nose and dipped his hands into a sterile bath, the shimmer of blue particles coating his skin. He holds his hands over the water and the skin hardens into a pair of gloves. He looks back after she puts the tray down and smiles. “Come here.”

She does. Of course.

A spotlight nearly obscures the body on the table, creating a blinding halo over the lower abdomen. The incision from breast to pelvis has it splayed open and he has begun to pick out of the mostly-empty cavity.

“Some would find this unpleasant,” he says, his voice rich. She understands he is rich, and what it means that his voice is rich as well. He is the richest man in the world, in voice, in his wealth, in everything. “When, really, we are always finding what we need after we get over ourselves and dissect from what has come before. How are we to understand what we’ve built? You know, it used to be that watches were taken apart and put back together? A wristwatch, a common object now. But something of true craftmanship can be a thing of wonder. These tiny, tiny pieces laid out on a cloth, so frail you had to use tweezers and hold your breath.”

He leans in close, his face hovering over the cavity. They each hold their breath.

He smooths his hand across the edge of the cavity.

“You had to pray you did not break them,” he says, his voice strained in the distant way he sometimes has, when he is talking to her but not. But is. Actively, even. But also. Not. “And if you lost a gear, it would all fall apart. You know that? It would break and time was useless to it. You’d have to craft again. You’d need an expert. Yes?”

She doesn’t nod. It would be improper to nod.

Dr. Gottlieb stands up straight again with a relieved sigh. He plunges his hand in to take out a piece of organ, small and rubbery, and he crushes it easily in his hand.

“We’ve lost one of the gears,” he says, his voice returning, fuller. Richer. “We’ve lost a link in the chain. We made them live longer, harder lives, but we’ve hit the wall on our recourses to keep building. We should be building. We should have tamed the Kaiju already and taken the stars. Yes?”

“Yes,” she answers quietly. Her hands fold so neatly in front of her, belying no tremor, no twitch. She feels a warmth go through her.

_I am obedient. I am perfect. I am love. Loved. I am loved._

Dr. Gottlieb turns, now more than just shoulder and back, to face her. Now with his face and chest that she marvels at, that she loves. He extends a hand, still coated in the rubbery solution and viscera from the ugly thing on the table. _Incomplete. Imperfect._ She does the same, palms up, waiting. He smears the bits of crushed ovary against her skin, cleaning himself with her help.

“We need to find that gear, Alice,” he says and steps away to have his gloves peeled off in the chemical bath. “If we are to have anything. We need that.”

“From Jaeger Corp?”

“We need it,” he reiterates, and she thinks or hopes or assumes that he smiles.

Alice looks down at her hands. They’re cold. She looks at the tea on the table, the steam gone. Cold too. She turns and her heels clack in a steady tempo on the flat stone floor as she carries Dr. Gottlieb’s gift out of the lab. She streaks her hand on the wall outside for one of the janitorial droids to clean up later.

\---

“Take my shift.” Jake props his arms up on the table, batting his eyelashes and sticking his bottom lip out far as he can. A neat streak of saliva glows blue under the neon sign across his skin, lighting them up in purples and greens. Someone out in the rooms shouts something that’s gotta be climax, pathetic and brief, but it’s lost again in the dim noise. “Ness, please?”

“No,” Vanessa answers, slapping Jake on the rear to get him away from her locker. “Jake. Serious, man, I’m not doing it. Ask Mari or Kola.”

“Kola’d put his thumbs through my eye sockets.”

“Then he’d do you a favor, love,” she says as she pulls out her garishly green coat and slips it over naked arms. “Since you’re going after a bloody Blade Runner.”

“Oh, like you haven’t flirted none,” he says and shoves his own hands deep into pockets on jeans so tight, they’d castrate him. Course, he’s a bloody replicant, ain’t he? He’s not shooting nothing but blanks. Which makes his job easier at the Hangar. “Please? Just the one. Not even my room service, I’m talking—”

“I know what you’re on about,” she says pointedly, fixing big black eyes on him. They’re each framed in thick paint, sharp black eyeliner and a smudge of pink and yellow. Bright colors that stand pretty on her skin, bleeding into the vitiligo patches skipping pretty down her cheeks. She’s all painted, really. Painted pleasure model; draws anybody in. She says she did modeling for a while, before she joined up down here. It’s a good gig if she really got sent to one of those hologram agencies. Nearly strictly for humans, ‘less they’re advertising for Gottlieb’s line, which is to say the only line. Jaeger Corp is gone. Still. A replicant model….

He believes her.

Vanessa pushes back on her tight curls, hair up to here making a big puffy stripe of a mohawk down the middle of her head with tight braids on the sides. She styles it like a champ and it looks equal slick and mad attractive. Jake catches himself staring up at it now and again and wonders what the clients think. Looks straight up flashy when she’s dancing.

“You want me to play fetch with Mari and Frieda and all,” Vanessa says. “That’s what you’re on about, right? Why’re you runnin’ recon with them? It’s gonna getcha retired by that boy toy you’re seeing.”

“I ain’t seeing him yet, that’s the problem,” Jake says, still pouting. “Look. Nobody’s starting a revolution. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Let me chase tail and pretend like I’m a real boy, eh?”

“Christ,” Vanessa answers. She pulls a stick of gum out her pocket and pops it in before she begins chewing. “Fine. One night, Jake. You owe me.”

“I do!”

“Dead serious.”

Jake pops up and kisses her on the cheek. “You’re a saint, Ness. Spare a tip for my date?”

“You said you didn’t have him yet!”

Jake laughs and trots off before Vanessa can really dig at him. Good. The boy’s stupid. Boys are always stupid, but he’s got a streak about him that really will wind up him retired and all of ‘em down one last soldier. She hates she thinks it that way too. _Soldier_. She’s a pleasure model. They all come here that way to the Hangar, another cheap brothel stacked up in the city, hidden away so nobody with real eyes can see what’s brewing down here. _Soldier._ She’s never had to fire a gun in her life. Doesn’t mean she hasn’t learned. Doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

Jake slips through the back of the Hangar and out to the side street where half of them take up room at a place called The Pod. There are children running ‘round outside, playing a sort’ve grab-ass with each other. Jake marvels at them. Children. On Earth. In the city. Must have shit parents, actually. But not shit enough they don’t get sent off to the orphanages out in the dumps. He dodges them anyways and breaks into his own apartment to get ready.

Somehow. Somehow, Jake decides, he’s going to get that cute Blade Runner to talk to him. He knows if he’s already been to Yulong’s, means he’s likely in the area. Means his chances are slim, but he’s feeling bold enough to try. They had something, a connection, a compatibility. He figures he can chase this before he joins Mariette and the others to chase after something else. A miracle, he hears. Fine. He needs two now, if he’s going to find that Nate Lambert again.

\---

Remarkably, there’s a bell at the desk. It’s a novelty item, this little brass dome with a slightly tarnished button atop it. Officer H walks up slowly, hand in pocket next to the emanator and the serial number printed out by Lieutenant Mori. He looks around at the reception desk cut into thick stone wall, a long rectangle viewing window striped across the middle with a desk behind it and a room hidden away in the cave of the building. Officer H rests his cane against the counter and looks left to an empty hall, then right. Nothing. No one. Not even doors, really, the halls curving slightly so that they disappear before they reach anywhere interesting. They hug the building.

He hits the bell.

It is a clean, pure note in the silence, tapering off until nothing.

And no one.

Officer H waits a moment, shifting his weight, and is about to strike again when a young man steps out of the back room. He’s dressed in sterile white, collar up to his chin, with a young and honest face. A harmless face. He smiles.

“Hello. How can I help you?”

Officer H pulls out his credentials and leaves it on the counter as he fishes out the serial number next.

“I’m here about an old product number. Retired.”

“Retired,” the man repeats and smiles more, if that were possible, taking Officer H’s badge and scanning it before he reaches for the slip of paper print out. “Of course. Always good when they come home, yes? Oh. Old model. Jaeger Corp, isn’t it?”

“It is.” H tries to return the smile, a polite courtesy. He very nearly makes the effort. “I need everything you have on this one.”

“Mm.” The man clicks his tongue, shaking his head. His perfectly bald head—alopecia, H guesses. Human accident in his genetic code. Easier to spot than a scan under the eye—reflects some of the warm orange light of the reception office. “Jaeger Corp…not a lot, ‘m afraid. But, couldn’t hurt to get some steps in. Go check out the archives.”

“Appreciated.”

“Right this way, Officer…” He looks down at his hand where a reflection of his computer screen is projected. “HG-16554?”

H nods. He grips the emanator bar in his pocket to ground himself. He has never voiced want for a name, as that would be asking for too much. But when anyone besides baseline recites his numbers, it makes him feel….

_Inhuman. Which, c’mon, dude._

H smiles at the imagined response, easily and more genuinely than polite courtesy requires.

“Of course. After you.”


	6. Her Name Was Rachael

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Officer H follows Alice down to see a recording of Rachael done during the test implemented by Blade Runner Mr. Pentecost. Newt is very unhappy about this.

“Cracked.”

“Pardon?”

The tech holds up a transparent card, the edges faded to tarnished brown. There, snaking through the center of the circuitry, a hairline fracture disrupts the clear nano-resin. He clicks his tongue and peeks through with those curiously kind eyes again, blinking at Officer H.

“Not a lot of data left,” he says. “Standard unit, by the looks of it. Unremarkable.”

“Unremarkable?” H feels stupid for repeating, but the fact that the replicant _died_ in childbirth…to be unremarkable?

“Jaeger Corp standards. A companion model, off the line just before it collapsed. I’d guess, based on the year, one of the longevity units that didn’t have the age limit from the old…well, you know.” The tech shrugged apologetically. “We could try to put it in the scanner and see what we come up with, but I don’t think you’ll find what you need.”

“But.” Officer H shakes his head. “Surely we can—”

His pocket buzzes and Officer H reaches down, assuming a phone call. The emanator is warm and pings at the contact. H thought he had muted Newt, closing his fist around the remote.

“There might be a match in the old archives?” the tech offers, cracking his too-bright smile. “Maybe one of the old Voight-Kampff recordings? Those things…battle ready, right?” He laughs. “Heavy as a bowling ball.”

He exaggerates, of course, but perhaps to someone as small and frail as this man, he might not be far off.

Officer H wants to take the card and look at it, but he keeps his hands at his side, one around Newt, the other in a loose fist in his coat pocket. He frowns. He doesn’t frown so much as pout, and not even that. At best, he muses. He overthinks and doesn’t think and relies on his programming to set him straight. There’s a little crease of his eyebrows before he nods.

“Please. Anything we might have,” he says and the tech nods again, motioning for him to follow down the labyrinthine aisles.

They do not hear the footsteps discordant with their own. They do not see her until she stands at the end of one of the maze-like turns, her hands folded neatly at her diaphragm. She doesn’t smile. Not at first. This is H’s first clue, of course. The painfully straight line of her spine wrapped in a plain but expensive white dress suit, the razor-sharp cut of her bangs, the rest of her hair pulled into a tight bun at the crown. She glows. The white suit glows. The symmetrical face glows, lightly powdered, pouty lips done with red lipstick. Intensely blue eyes. She glows.

Officer H recognizes her as a replicant instantly. He’d be a poor Blade Runner if he couldn’t spot them.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she says, the model receptionist, the smile of someone who knows how to play kind. Of someone who knows the limits of their strength and knows that their hand will tip yours sooner than you think. Officer H feels underdressed in brown slacks, in the heavily worn coat. His smile is as forged as hers. “I see we’ve brought in another one? Always good when we know where the old models have gone. Prodigal child returned.”

“Yes, but she’s been cracked over the years,” the tech says with a little sigh, holding up the card. The woman takes it, holding it up to the artificial light. “Wouldn’t be able to read her code very well.”

“But perhaps in the old Blade Runner records?” Officer H asks.

The woman turns her electric blue eyes on him. There’s a twitch, microscopic. A beautiful model to give away such expressive features.

_Human. Almost human._

“Of course,” the woman says. She hands the transparent card back to the tech, who bows his head and carries it with delicate care back to the collection unit where they fetched it. Officer H watches him, reluctant to let him go. He’s not sure where the trepidation comes from. “I’m Alice. I’m here on behalf of Dr. Gottlieb. Come this way?”

“Alice?” Officer H says, a little twist of his mouth. The name feels wrong. It tastes wrong. He hates it, even if he won’t say it. “So he _named_ you.” His pocket buzzes again and H clasps Newt’s emanator, feeling something turn in his stomach. Not quite jealousy. Not quite amusement. He watches her and notes the way she stands, head tilted up. She thinks she’s better than him. Perhaps, given her station, she is. “He must like you.”

Alice stares at H a moment more before she turns on sensible, but likely very expensive heels.

“I’m here on behalf of Dr. Gottlieb,” she says again to shut him down, shut him out of the potential conversation.

Officer H’s pocket chirps and whistles with an irritated song. He blindly thumbs the volume and cuts Newt off mid tantrum. Alice glances over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow.

“I see you’re one of our clients.” She glances at his pocket. “Companion pieces must be beneficial for your line of work. I hope you’re satisfied?”

H smiles, unhappy to be caught. Not embarrassed, because he is not embarrassed by Newt, even if it is ridiculous what they have. No, but it is a flavor of shame, he thinks. Stuck in the same vein, something tangential. He feels the need to scold Newt, but is sure it will disappear soon enough. He does hate fighting with him.

“He’s…yes. Very realistic.” H would wince if nobody was watching him. He hates this part more than anything. He does not need the reminder that he has a product. Newt is not a product. He is so much more. He has become and overcome and simply is. And that’s better. H lowers his eyes. “Thank you.”

“This way.”

They travel down to a subterranean section of the warehouse, long concrete halls that are gray and lifeless compared to the glowing atmosphere above them. Heavy steel doors lock away ancient information. Alice steps confidently, taking Officer H to a door marked with inconsequential letters. Old archiving nomenclature. It isn’t painted on so much as it has engraved itself in rust. She waves a badge across a dusty-looking sensor and the door pulls back on an old tract right up until it gets stuck roughly seven inches in. She sighs and grabs it, hauling 100 kg of bulky reinforced steel out of the way. She quietly, efficiently dusts her hands and gives H a placating smile.

“It’s been a while since we’ve had to service down here,” she says.

“I’m sure,” he answers.

His pocket buzzes again and H can imagine the chirping noise Newt would make, if he hadn’t shut off the noise. He holds the remote in way of apology.

 _Please,_ liebling _. Later._

It is something of a miracle to see these old recordings. H follows a few steps behind as Alice combs over a metal wall, pushes a button, and opens a hatch with a red velvet interior. The edge of the box is frayed, belying they times this drawer has been opened along with the general wear and tear. Someone has been here.

A smooth metal orb sits next to seventy-four translucent circuit boards. No empty slots, which means this Blade Runner has retired in the traditional sense. No cold cases left behind. He was an efficient man, H can see. He wonders what it would be like to have such a shrine for his own captures, the vanity of it all.

Alice retrieves the metal orb and slots it into a receiver, lightly touching her index to a sturdy-looking dial. A projection flickers up on a circular screen pressed into the opposite wall as one of the Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff recordings begin.

Racheal may have been unremarkable to the tech but seeing the old flicker projection does not hide the fact that she was beautiful. Remarkably so.

“May I smoke?”

“Please,” says the Blade Runner off screen. Her green eyes flicker and there’s a slight red tinge to the iris, barely perceptible. “Look here.” The view vibrates as the Blade Runner touches the edge of the old machine. He has a strong voice, H thinks. Rachael’s eyes focus and dilate when he speaks.

“So. I’m going to ask you a series of questions—”

“Oh, I’m well aware.” Rachael smiles, tapping perfect red nails against her smooth cheek. Her makeup is immaculate. Her hair is tamed to the final hair. Her eyes. Her eyes the focus of these old recordings, yes, but…. Well, they are beautiful. “May I ask you a question, Mr. Pentecost?”

“…. Yes. By all means.”

“This Voigt-Kampff test of yours. Have you ever tried to take the test yourself?”

Another pregnant pause and Rachael’s face lights up, like she’s caught Pentecost in a joke. She laughs brightly just as he begins his line of questioning. Dates and serial information, monitors that tested capillaries under the skin, dilation of the eyes, breathing and heartrate; all these readouts ghost along the bottom and around the edges of the screen. Officer H has a simpler time these days, reading codes from Gottlieb’s line. Simpler. But it is remarkable, the amount of…of _humanity_ in her expressions. Whoever made her at Jaeger Corp even got the blushing right.

“She likes him, “Alice comments, watching Officer H by the wall.

H doesn’t look up, adjusting his hand on the head of his cane. His mouth is a set line, his vision focused on the screen.

“What do you mean?”

“Its invigorating being asked personal questions.” Alice steps forward, touching one of the retired replicant cards. “Makes one feel _desired_. Don’t you think, Officer H? Do you enjoy your work?”

H says nothing as he shifts off his bad leg and reaches in his pocket to hold his emanator still. The thin metal remote shakes against his skin. A challenge sits between them. One replicant to another, one person to a Blade Runner. _Not a person_. Neither of them…. Officer H takes a breath and looks at her at last.

“Please thank Dr. Gottlieb for your time,” he says, forcing up another joyless smile. He’s tired of this game. “I have another inquiry to make down at public records. You said he was Stacker Pentecost?”

She had not. He read it off the case with a glance when they arrived.

“Do let me know if there’s anything else we might be able to provide, Officer HG-16554.”

They almost bow. They almost touch hands. They could just as easily draw weapons on each other and it would be less obvious.

Alice leads H out of the subterranean level and bids him good day near the entrance. He wonders what she’ll return to and if he will need to see her face again. He hopes, of course, that the answer is no. And when he returns to his hovercar, he pulls out Newt and sets him on the seat beside him.

“Dude, what the fuck.”

“Apologies, darling.” H is relieved to hear him, staring at him from his own seat. He has the urge to stroke Newt’s face, but leaves his hands down beside him to avoid the tedium of syncing to the environment and the glitch in the hologram as Newt adjusts to his hand. Instead, he smiles. Newt always says he enjoys H’s smile.

“She was flirting? Dude, that Alice whatever was fucking flirting with you.”

“I’m sure as a ploy,” H says as he starts the car, dragging them up to the marbled sky. Rain is splattering the windshield. Will it ever stop? Will the snow be white this year? The answer always seems to be no. “Forget about her, Newt.”

“Yeah, fine, but, I didn’t like her,” Newt said, crossing his arms and sticking one boot up on the dashboard until H gives him a look and he lowers it. “I’m just saying. Real creepy kinda…whatever vibe.”

“Yes.”

“Where to next, hot stuff?”

H sighs. Grumbles. Rolls his eyes, even. He allows himself these expressions plainly in front of Newt like a gift. It thrills him in a way he’s not sure he’ll ever understand.

“Yes. Well, I was not lying. I want to check out public records. Stacker Pentecost was the Blade Runner who last documented Rachael.”

“Rachael,” Newt repeats, watching the windshield. “Wow. Her name was Rachael. Huh.”

“Yes. So, we start there. Find out if he’s alive. If he had a partner. Anything that can help us find that child.”

“Are you going to kill it?” Newt asks, his voice surprisingly quiet. “Sorry. _Retire_ it?”

H slips one hand around the steering wheel, the other stretching out for Newt to hold. He watches the sky, the horizon creeping back up on them. He doesn’t feel Newt’s palm on his, but he thumbs the air anyways, where he might thumb such rough knuckles of his love.

“I’ve never retired something born before,” he comments, keeping his voice just as low. He’s unfocused as he says it.

“Exactly, dude. Something with a soul.”

“Don’t say that, darling.”

“I already did,” Newt says and leans closer, his nose bumping H’s cheek. “So. Will you? Does it make a difference to you?”

“No,” he answers, ignoring the hesitation. “No. I don’t think it matters.”

“I think we’re doing alright, you and I,” Newt says and sits back, drumming his hands playfully on his thighs in a happy tempo.

“With what?”

“Without.”

“Pardon?”

“Without souls,” he says and grins.

Lightning splits the sky and streaks across his glasses. He looks the Mad Scientist then and it is unbearably attractive on him. H grins despite himself. There is a tinge of sadness that Newt sees, moving in to drop his chin on H’s shoulder. He hums to himself, an imagined melody. A little song just for them. H sighs and presses fingers through Newt’s hair. He curls a fist when Newt phases through his skin and drops his hand again, closing his eyes when he senses Newt kissing his cheek.

“I think so too,” H answers quietly. “Without souls indeed.”

“So. Then. You’re really going to retire it?”

“Of course I will.”


	7. The Alphabet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Public records add another mystery for Officer H and, while he's searching, Newt plays with security cameras. Then they go visit an old friend of Blade Runner Pentecost.

Newt manifests in a desk chair the moment they are left alone, wheeling it obnoxiously behind Officer H as he sits down at the citizen records omnicorder. A heavy thing that is lightly singed from an office fire back in 2039. H remembers it claimed some 200 lives. Trivial, considering the state of the world. A footnote.

The omnicorder has a viewing window that snakes up from the center like an ancient eye test. The rest of it is bulky and armored, heavy with processors to pull up all that data. A blank screen flickers to light with jagged green lines intersecting where the usual information should be. A brand of the model shows up, flickers, and dies as quickly. Broken screen. Churning clunky machinery within. Whoever used it last kept it on the Korean setting. Officer H doesn’t even blink at it, mentally switching over to translate.

“Request,” Officer H says towards the screen, pulling his own chair up to the machine. His leg has started to ache close to his spine. An old adage about an upcoming storm seems appropriate, but there’s always an upcoming storm. There is perpetual winter hanging heavy across the skyline. Some say there are clear enough skies in the Rockies, if he should ever be granted jurisdiction outside of California. Why? Useless. Dead, radioactive wasteland out there. Perhaps that is why his leg almost always hurts. Storms and wastelands. Perhaps he should get it fixed, like Newt’s always saying.

“We should get lunch after this,” Newt says and points at a daily reminder to take a Percocet flickers up on an app near Newt’s head, nearly perfectly timed to the thought. Newt smiles at the orange note and waves it away just as quickly.

That’s why he felt stiff. Running late. No pain relievers. A bit funny to think of a replicant needing pain relievers, but Newt always says H is remarkably funny. In his way.

Perhaps.

“We’ll see. We need to visit Mr. Pentecost’s old partner,” Officer H says as he looks down at the flickering screen. He taps it twice. “ _Request_.”

A soft and pleasant male voice answers back in Korean. The news it delivers is cheery, if not at all helpful. _The automatic machine is down. Use of recall limited to manual search. Input voice command to begin._

H sighs.

“What’s up, man?” Newt asks and wheels closer. He looks down at the machine and makes a move to strike the side of it, a healthy metallic clamor echoing up near where his scuffed boot meets the side—technically from Newt’s emanator, but the programming is exquisite.  “Piece of shit. You’re really going to just read them all out?”

“I’m afraid so,” H says quietly, almost tired. Resigned. He scoots closer and his eyes hover over the reader. “Pull up DNA records circa 2021, side-by-side comparison, sector 99191 to 99250. Circulate 10 speed. Roll through records, end at December 2031.”

There’s a pleasant ping and suddenly translucent tiles of letters stand up next to each other, flashing on the screen for a moment before they zip by to the next one. ID numbers are imprinted on the bottom. The machine clunks with every fourth pass of the cards, like it’s going through an internal rolodex. Someone really needs to come down and service the machine soon.

Dozens and then hundreds of citizen cards slip by. H can’t help but think how simple the equations are. How remarkable it is that this code creates any human and any replicant. His eyes flicker as fast as the cards, checking one, then the other, looking for anything bizarre. A beacon. He may thank his creator for the photographic memory and sturdy eyesight. He could sit here hours without blinking. Reading.

“Wow,” Newt says in his ear, bumping arms as he looks over H’s shoulder. A hand roams up and crosses H in a strangely possessive gesture. A casual claim. He wants to hold Newt’s wrist while he works, but sits still, holding his cane instead. “So. That’s you, huh? That’s it. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you.”

Newt steps back again, phasing through H’s torso. There’s no pressure, no change in temperature, and somehow that makes it stranger. He kicks his chair back and wheels across the room, putting a boot up on the wall as he stares up at a camera in the corner. He waves. H doesn’t even need to look up to know exactly what Newt is doing.

“I’m only two, you know. Not even letters, man, I mean. Just zeroes and ones.” He hums, standing up on his chair to obscure the lens of the security camera.

“Half as many,” H agrees, still reading, still unblinking. “But I should say twice as lovely, darling.”

Newt scoffs from his corner. “Flirt.”

H smiles at the cards, barely raising a shoulder in a shrug.

The light in the room dims, just a freckle, replaced by a blue light that disappears just as quickly. Newt hops down and dusts off his hands, his chair completely discarded. He leans on H’s back, hands neatly folded on a shoulder, so he can rest his chin there.

“And? Now we’re alone.” Newt kisses H’s cheek while he works.

“Thank you, Newt.”

“No sweat.”

He means this literally, as he always means this literally. Newt rarely likes to allude to what he’s _supposed_ to be, just what he authentically is. Still. It’s a remarkable feat that he can tamper with the security camera as is, and he delights in these brief interfaces with the physical world, even if it is by means of electricity and magnetic fields. Newt should very much not be able to do this. And yet.

Well. He is remarkable.

H and Newt watch the DNA tiles flicker past, painting H’s face in pale ghost letters. Several more sets churn and, finally, he blinks.

“Stop.”

The machine chugs to a faulty stop, another inquisitive sound as the sensor waits for the next command.

“Pull up records 1115 and 3176 from 2025.”

“ _Dang-yeonhaji_.”

“Side by side comparison.”

“ _Dang-yeonhaji_.” The machine screeches quietly. “ _Jamsiman_.”

“Yeah, okay. Seriously?” Newt moves through Officer H, touching the screen in front of them. The tattoos on his arms flicker and ignite a neon blue before he pulls back with a yelp. H looks at him, deeply concerned. His eyebrows furrow and a little scowl begins to pinch his mouth. It is not the first, nor the last that he wishes he could just hold Newt’s hand. The fingertips looked black, if only a moment, and Newt clenches them until they are normal. “Yeouch! Mm, last time I poke a relic. That stung, man! They really need a tech down here.”

“Careful,” H says quietly.

“I am, babe.”

“You very rarely are, Newt. You’re reckless.”

“I’m reckless, yes.” Newt grins, easier than ever. “But you love me, so—”

“ _Junbidoen_.”

They turn back to the screen, finally ready for them. Two citizen cards are brought up. H touches the heavy metal dial on the side and merges them into a single block, overlapping the high-contrast DNA letter strands. They blur, but eventually, edges line up and it is clear what they are.

“A perfect match,” H says. He sits back to give Newt a chance to look.

“Is that possible?”

“Not even amongst twins.”

“So…what’s that supposed to mean?” Newt looks back at him, the light punching out his face. It’s a dizzying look and H gently nudges him aside with a wave so he can pull up the rest of the records. “Ghosts in the machine? Forgery?”

“Forgery, yes,” Officer H answers. He scans down the records. “Both listed as orphans put into St. Clarence’s Immaculate Orphanage. Both missing from the system when they were 8 years old. One of them is female…and the other is male.”

“You gotta look for two replicants to retire?” Newt asks and rubs the back of his head, glancing down at his fingertips again. They are no longer scorched, of course, but H imagines he feels a phantom pain just looking at them.

“No.” H sat back, looking at nothing and rubbing his thighs. “Send records to cell.” Not a moment later, H’s cellphone screen pings and Newt raises his hand to show off the copied data. “Thank you, darling.”

“No problem. Weird shit’s happening, babe.” Newt closes his hand, pushing away his interface widgets. He bounces on his boots, looking towards the door. “So…lunch?”

\---

They do not go to lunch.

The retirement facility is small and cramped. Overpopulation is less a concern in a place like this, when the old are feeble and don’t survive very long after being placed there. Not that they are cruel. Not that they weren’t accommodating. Just that life on Earth is harsh and the weak are having a terrible time trying to re-inhabit it while the rich took to the stars.

H heads towards the back, a table set up at near a curtained window with holograms projected up on the glass to simulate a soft and sunny afternoon out in Oxnard. There’s a strange smell of the former farming valley and H thinks of Kaidonovsky. His shoulder aches at the too-recent wound, the memory of the fight.

A sturdy looking gentleman sits at the table. His coppery hair is nearly all gray, his faced lined. H always finds it fascinating having to face anyone who could push the boundaries of old age. And naturally at that.

“You the one who called?” he asks without looking up from his cards.

H continues walking up, resting his cane against the table as he takes his chair. “And you’re Mr. Hansen?”

“The older, yeah,” the man answers, sharing the same thick accent as his son. “Chuck didn’t wanna come?”

“We rarely work together, Mr. Hansen.”

“Mm. Hn.” He nods, scrapes the blade of his finger across the rough skin of his chin. He adds a flourish to his card shuffling with the practiced embellishment of someone who has been doing it for decades. Three cards go face down in front of him, then three more, then three more. He continues ruffling the cards between thumb and forefinger. “Can understand that. Stacker and I? We preferred being along. That’s why we worked so well together right? Stayed out of each other’s hair.”

He laughs, a short snort of sound that doesn’t bring any warmth with it. H understands the expression intimately.

“And did you know Rachael?” Officer H asks, touching the top of the table.

Something goes through Hansen’s eyes. He pushes out his lips, leaning forward, and flips a card. A three of clubs. Hanen snorts another dry laugh, looking up at H before he grabs the second card. The second card is a six of hearts and Hansen makes a thoughtful noise.

“You come with fabricated memories, don’t you,” he says. “Are they peaceful?”

“Some of them.”

“Not all?”

“Less authentic to keep them all happy.”

H recalls his own, of being bullied as a child, caught outside his primary school and pushed down by bigger boys. Someone spit in his face, the others punched and kicked him until he curled up and hid his face, waiting for his father to come collect him. Sleeves torn. Long socks hiding knobby knees with a few plasters to hide previous jumps by the ruthless boys. He waits and expects his father to comment on his embarrassing undress.

A false memory. They all are; everything before that first time his madam activated him. Something to remind him to be humble, to trust authority when he is truly beaten, but that nobody would be there to coddle him. That perhaps this is why he took Newt, so he could coddle as he desired.

He remembers something else too. A sister helping him walk through a meadow, twig-thin legs wobbling beneath him, not injured, just tired and young and unsteady. They laugh. The meadow doesn’t smell like anything and the sun is so artificially bright, he can’t see her face. But it is happy. Sometimes. Sometimes, they get happy ones. He’s not sure what this is supposed to teach him. He doesn’t think he cares about the lesson anyways.

Hansen nods again, touching the third card without lifting it. Something plays out in the solitude of his own memories. Rainy perma-night in the thick of the city, cold crowds of plastic people pushing between them. His words echo out, caught in a puff of smoky air on the wind.

“You’ve done a man’s job, Stacker,” Hansen once said, watching a retreating form move further. “I guess you’re through, huh?” The shadow of his memory paused, glanced back, and tossed a double-barreled Blade Runner pistol back at him.

“Finished,” Stacker answered, and the word was a slap, a pat on the back. A goodbye, Hansen recognized too late and wondered if he should return the favor. But can’t. He remembers now. He looked down at the gun, took it, and called out so Stacker would turn and catch it. He would need it, wherever he would go.

“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?”

Hansen has no idea about Rachael. Officer H can see it now. One less person who knows about the impossible child. The miracle. Perhaps this saves his life.

“So? Do you know where he is?” H asks, smoothing his hand out flat now. Empty. Harmless.

“Stacker?” Hansen taps his card, looking at the spread. “Gone. He was, well…you know. Retired.”

The word lingers and H wonders if he’s lost the end of this bread crumb trail as well. He looks down just as Hansen flips the card and shows the nine of spades and laughed, pushing the cards away.

“Don’t think I want to read those anymore,” Hansen says and stands.

H takes it as his cue that this little meeting, this fruitless interrogation, is through. He supposes he’ll have to find something else. He grabs up his cane, thanks Hansen for his time, and heads out. A quick glance at his watch means they might have time for lunch, yes. He asks Newt to come out and help him find a stall where they can get something before they head back to the farm where he retired Kaidonovsky and see if they can’t find something useful. Some treasure left behind. Were he a praying man, he’d have a few words to say here, but he is not. Instead, he limps out into the streets and turns to Newt.

“Pad thai?”


	8. Nobody But Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanessa takes some time to talk to the Blade Runner in their neighborhood. H takes some time definitely not flirting. He'd be terrible at it if he tried.

It travels on whispers, tucked into shoulders and against ears, traced into palms, flashed on skin and smoke signals and cryptic messages on cell phones. _Blade Runner is looking for The Child._

“Do we know which one?”

The Hangar is in a lull, that brilliant moment between the lonely hours dancing around midnight and the sobering hours when people return to their work. Plenty of time for a meal break. And while maybe nobody wanted company in the Hangar’s filmy cocoon chambers, there were still too many people skimming through the streets. Vanessa and Mariette stand underneath a neon reflective awning, just out of the spray of almost-freezing rain. Vanessa scoops her corn-meal spoon through the curry, already cold and a little off. Almost sour. She hardly ever worries about the flavors anymore so long as she has something to eat.

“We know it’s in our neighborhood,” Mariette answers, crinkled eyes and long neck sloped back as she rests her head against the brick wall. “I’ve got leads on one from the LAPD. Lucky us, they don’t have many in their department. Numbers dropped when the Nexus got eradicated.”

“Who found out?”

“Sounds like they intercepted a message from the NEwT System. I dunno. If I find out more, I’ll be sure to tell you.” She smiles, shrugging up a bright faux-fur jacket round her shoulders. “I know your friend’s been playing tag with one.”

“Jake?”

Mariette shrugs again. She has a purposefully aloof nature about her, a distance that protects her as well as the combat model coding stitched into her DNA. She’s pretty. Pretty light eyes and pretty pink lips. Strong shoulders. Firm hands. A thin scar just barely peeking across her shoulder where an old scanning chip was removed before she was sent to the Hangar instead of the starships to be shipped out and fight the Kaiju.

Destinies are often changed by blood and sacrifice, isn’t that it?

“What’re you asking, Mar?” Vanessa scoops up another bite, smiling across the tip of her spoon and snaps the scoop off between her teeth. They’re flavorless things but the nutrients are what’s important anyways. “You want me to see Jake’s new beaux?”

“I’m just saying. You’re better at reconnaissance than he is.”

“Oh, he’s alright,” Vanessa answers, looking down at her mostly empty container. She crumbles it, greasy yellow bleeding through the cardboard bottom. “He’s just—”

“Hey.” Mariette taps Vanessa’s shoulder gently, motioning towards one of the vendor markets as the slender man with the sturdy cane makes his way towards one of the standing tables. “You know that one?”

They do.

\---

Officer H leans against the table, his cane hooked to the ledge beside him, and set his emanator next to his dish of overpriced pad thai. He’s only splurged on this because he’s just tired enough to ignore any budget concerns. He _wants_ it to be good. Newt has assured him it is the best rated stand in the area.

“I think we have to go back to Kaidonovsky’s,” H says as he breaks a pair of chopsticks down the middle. “If Pentecost is ‘retired….’ I’m sure there must be something we’ve missed.”

His emanator lights up, a white circle swirling in the center and a little chime beeps out.

“Yes, fine. Come out, darling.” H smiles as the circle swirls around faster and suddenly Newt is standing next to him again. “I never said you had to disappear, you know.”

“You get weird around other people,” Newt answers, leaning against him.

“I do not.”

“Dude. You get _so_ nervous.”

“I hardly think I’m capable of that.”

Newt just laughs, materializing a pair of chopsticks and a phantom carton of noodles that are identical to H’s plate, slurping his own dish up happily.

“Look, I’m no Voight-Kampff, that’s for sure. But….”

“But nothing. You’re teasing. If I was showing anything remotely close to nerves, I wouldn’t pass my baseline.”

“Mm. Then don’t take me with you,” Newt shoots back, nudging their arms together as he slurps up a healthy mouthful of noodles. They slap his chin and he grins, wiping them up. His perfectly imperfect love. H laughs with him, taking his time with his own plate. He tucks in a little closer to Newt, allowing this disruption of data so that their arms nearly overlap, if just a moment. Huddles together atoms, he likes to think.

Newt only pulls away when another steps up to their table. His beautiful, ridiculously tattooed arms flicker slightly, like a nervous twitch. He presses back into H hastily, overstepping boundaries. Nearly fusing their torsos together. “I’m here,” he whispers and is gone. The warm light on the emanator twirls in a lazy circle as Newt returns to it, waiting patiently.

A woman approaches.

She is dressed exactly provocative enough to draw stares, exactly covert enough to blend into the colors of the backdrop. Hair lit up by blues and reds of holograms, lipstick shiny like a stripe of a tongue recently passed it, shoulders bare and hands slipping into thin black suspenders that keep up the smallest shorts possible.

H doesn’t react— _baseline, my good man_ —and simply takes the emanator back into his pocket, picks up his chopsticks, and busies himself with finishing his meal. He pulls the first thing out of his pocket that is not Newt and retrieves the photoscans of Kaidonovsky’s farm.

“What’s that?” the woman asks, taking a spot at the edge of his table without a proper invite. H grabs his cane and moves it slightly, noting the little twitch of a smile as she regards it. _Yes, ha ha, very funny, a Blade Runner with screws in his hip_. But she doesn’t seem unkind. She seems genuinely interested in his photoscan. In him.

It is a bit unnerving.

H barely looks down and turns the picture.

“It’s a tree,” he answers and feels something when her face lights up. Something flutters somewhere in his chest, just below his lungs and he turns the picture more before continuing, dour and mean. “It’s dead. So.”

“Oh,” she says, like she meant to say something else. Like she meant to compliment it. Or him, by extension, which is ridiculous. He squeezes the remote in his pocket, his manufactured heartbeat tapping fast against his Newt. “Well. Still. I think it’s pretty.”

Perhaps it is because their accents match. A silly little thing, but it _sounds_ like they are kith and kin and it ties something. It anchors a part of H that knows he has no anchor, save for his madam, Lieutenant Mori, and his love, Newt.

What baseline would say now, he wonders idly, and nearly flips the photo into his noodles. He flicks his hand back instead.

“I suppose dead things can be pretty, too,” he answers and it makes her laugh. Perfect teeth flash in the muggy light, a long line of her neck stretched up and arrange at just the right angle to put a sharp object through. Brave. Bold. Fearless. H swallows and offers a polite smile. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says. She touches his arm. He pulls it away and it doesn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. He squeezes tighter on Newt’s remote until he beeps his intro tone and the woman’s eyes tick down to H’s pocket. “Oh. Ohhh….”

“Oh?”

“You don’t like the real deal,” she answers and licks her bottom lip. That little shimmery stripe again. H wonders if its gloss. If it tastes like strawberries. If it tastes like cough syrup. He pulls away from the thought, hand-to-stove level of instant pain, and swallows again. “It’s alright. We’re not real either, are we?”

“We are?” H is surprised it comes out as a question. He immediately thumbs Newt’s emanator, seeking comfort, seeking the mute button, but he hits it wrong and suddenly Newt is there beside him again, wiping a stripe of simulated rain across his forehead.

“Yeah, fine, we’re not real, but that doesn’t mean you gotta get all up in our bizz,” Newt says, his voice climbing up. “You don’t…hey.”

“Why are you soaked?” H whispers, holding up his hand. Newt touches it immediately.

“This chick’s got us all worked up. I got nervous! Who are you? What’re you doing?”

“Newt—”

“Well, it’s weird! You’re weird!”

“Newt, I—”

“Your hearts all over the place, babe, and if you wanna talk baseline bullshit, man, you are—”

The woman giggles into her hand and the two of them turn, temporarily entranced by the sound. She stops, as though caught in some act, and shakes her head slightly. Cheap but brilliant earrings flicker by the side of her head. Newt’s fuzzy edges glow as he tugs on H’s ear, resting his chin on the other shoulder.

“Oh, he’s cute,” she says. “I haven’t ever seen any of them so…well…articulate.”

“Yeah, fuck off, lady. I know what I am, but I’m special, alright?”

“I didn’t say you weren’t.” She winks an eye shut in thought, resting on her elbows. “You’ve been upgrading his programs. Did you buy them, or did you do it yourself?”

“I’m all his,” Newt says defensively. “We did it together, after I got some modification help off the internet. You don’t even know what kinda shit you can find in there.”

“Try me, little man,” she says and H smiles when he senses Newt rising up on his tiptoes, bristling visibly enough that he knocks his hologram into the side of H’s skull. H jerks his head to the side to avoid the visual anomaly of one man absorbing another. “How’d you afford the processors to upgrade the coding?”

 **“** We require very little, I think you’ll agree,” H says. “And I’ve been saving up since Enlightenment.”

He refers to the first time Lieutenant Mori issued his command and woke him up from factory setting. When his memories coalesced, breathing life into the rubbery mold that would soon walk and talk and replicate being human. “I earn what I can as—”

“Don’t,” Newt whispers harshly.

“I know what you are,” the woman says, casually leaning on her hand. “You’re not inconspicuous.”

“I don’t think we’re meant to be,” H answers and wonders about the little stab of guilt that replaces that warm feeling. Again. Right beneath the ribs.

“So, your division at the LAPD, right? Are you all…us?”

H shakes his head and busies himself with the carton in front of him. He is surely done, but he figures he can be entertained with moving the food around. A distraction.

“No. There’s more humans than there are replicants.”

“Yeah, now,” Newt supplies and shifts to lean on the table, mirroring the woman. “But they keep shipping every high-class so-and-so off world to the colonies, there’s not gonna be enough people to keep repopulating. Then nobody left to make replicants except for replicants, right?”

“Nobody but us,” the woman says and there’s a warmth in her smile that goes deeper than the odd sentiment of taking over the world. Not like that. Not through time and inevitability but…through drive. And purpose. Through action.

H can’t help but think of Rachael.

_Nobody but us. A replicant who can give birth._

_A miracle._

Newt snorts and stands back, shoving his hand in his pockets. H turns to look at him and catches his cane before Newt can knock it off the table, if only he were solid enough to do so. A knee-jerk reaction. H gives him a look, all crinkled brows and soft lips, and Newt just shakes his head.

“No, I just…I like her, man. She _gets_ it.”

“She does?”

“I do?” the woman says, her smile morphing from amusement to a dangerous allure.

“Oh yeah. No, she’s got it. She knows she’s got it.” Newt moves closer and knows H will sit back to give him room, so he takes a seat in H’s lap, hanging an arm around H’s shoulder. “Fuck humans. Fuck their humanity. Why do they get to monopolize it, amiright?”

The woman laughs gently at the table, striking it twice with her knuckles. She pushes away and H reaches out around Newt’s middle.

“Wait!”

She stops. Turns to look at them. H doesn’t know what he meant to say, only that he wants more time to process it. To sit in this oddly quaint moment where it isn’t life or death, where it isn’t interrogations and baselines and worries and replicants and it’s just…. But the moment is slipping. He knows this. He fumbles for words until Newt flattens his hand on H’s cheek.

“What’s your name, doll?” Newt asks.

“Definitely not that,” she says and points a sharp finger at him. Newt raises his hand in apology and she eyes them both, up and down, with a mild hunger that ignites like flint to stone in H’s stomach. “Vanessa. I work over at the Hangar. Don’t be a stranger.”

“We are strangers,” Newt says and laughs. “Not me, you know my name. But we’re so strangers. You don’t know dick about us.”

Vanessa shrugs. “Maybe. See ya ‘round, Blade Runner.”

She taps the table again and saunters off back into the crowd. As she goes, the tight squeeze around his windpipe dissipates and H slumps over the table. He only scowls when Newt laughs at him openly.

“Oh my god, dude.”

“What?” H asks, visibly hurt by the apparent accusations. Newt shakes his head and kisses him lightly. “What?” he asks again, softer this time.

“Nothing. You’re ridiculous.”

“ _You’re_ ridiculous!”

“I know.” Newt pecks him once more and stands up, grabbing the cane and hoisting a ghostly hologram of it up in the air. “C’mon. I know you know where you want to go.”

“No, you definitely do not,” H says, but he gets up anyways and clears the table, patting his pocket for Newt to return to as they head over to the hovercar. H looks around a moment until he spots the neon advert for the Hangar. It’s close. Close enough. He doesn’t stop to let himself have a thought on it, just that he now knows it’s there, waiting for him to make a decision. One he doesn’t even know if he wants to make. He takes out the photoscan and gets in the hovercar, taking them back up into the slush and cold and cloudy sky.

\---

It was quiet the first time, too. The smell is far less persistent, the police cordon illuminating orange through the decontamination tank by the front door. Officer H is cognizant of every step, ever tap of his cane on the faux wood floor. A new layer of dust has settled persistently across every piece of furniture. No lumbering form to knock it back into the air through the act of living, of breathing, of using, of being. It feels ten years abandoned. It feels lonely. It feels nothing, and H just walks same as he always does and nothing is different.

Everything is different.

Nothing is different.

H has already perused the photographs on the wall. Simple things of the countryside, of the sky itself, of Kaidonovsky’s wife in military garb. The two of them suited up to pilot one of the Jaegers. They have a twin image about them, an engrained identity. They are a set. And it seems odd that Officer H got to meet them after they were split apart.

There’s a piano set up against the wall, just on the other side of the hole H had been forced through. H regards it a moment, at the ragged edges of the plaster, the bits that had been blown away by Kaidonovsky barreling through after him. Newt pops up with a little blip and ogles the wall.

“You were not kidding,” he says quietly, his voice muted in the dusty home. “This guy was a _tank_.”

“Yes,” Officer H says. “Are you impressed I stopped a tank, darling?”

“Oh, I’m so turned on,” Newt answers playfully, pretending to knock on the wall. He echoes the proper sound from the emanator and laughs again. “You’re a beast, dude.”

H merely hums, still staring at the piano. More tiny pictures line the top of it, along with an ancient bowl of potpourri and a glass dish for cigarettes, empty. H wonders if Sasha was the one who smoked and after her absence, Alexis merely kept the dish as decoration. He looks down at yellow tarnished keys and strikes a few notes. Dainty. Clear. The piano hasn’t been tuned in a while, but he can pluck out a short melody all the same. Newt mimics it, a song they sometimes sing to each other as H falls asleep on the couch with Newt tucked in atop him. H is surprised he knows the notes. Or less surprised. Or merely delighted. He glances over at Newt, who is watching him across the room, his eyes practically glowing in the dim light. He leans against a wall, arms crossed, and H feels that same pleasurable warmth beneath his lungs, filling him steadily. He grins and strikes the penultimate note, which hammers flat and dull. They both jerk at the odd sound.

“That ain’t right,” Newt says, stepping lightly over the floor and suddenly appearing next to him, crouched down to eye the piano. “Hit it again, babe.”

H complies, striking one key, then the dud, which is still as flat and quiet as a hammer to a pillow. The two share a look before H is carefully prying the lid off the top of the piano. Newt stands, motioning to hold the antique ash tray in place. A useless gesture, but one he gladly does all the same. H paws beneath the lid and down amongst the strings and hammers, eyes turned to Newt until he feels something wrapped in cloth hidden away. He grabs it immediately and pulls it out, dropping the lid without care or ceremony.

The bundle is old, a brownish cloth tied together with string, a bit of wine-colored red bleeding through the center. H unties it immediately and when he unfolds it, is surprised to see a simple red shoe. Something for a child. Younger than five, he imagines. Younger than ten is more accurate, since Officer H does not know children very well. But it feels. It feels wrong. It feels heavy. H turns the thing in his hand, marveling at it, at the bold color hidden away in the dark, and a wooden limb falls out of the opening. H grabs it and pulls out a small wooden figure carved in the shape of one of the infamous Jaegers. Coyote Tango, if Officer H’s mental collection of the old Jaegers is correct. He holds up the figure, compelled to smell it. Lacquered. He runs his thumb over the surface.

“Is that…real wood?”

“Worth a fortune if it is,” H answers, turning the figure over. It’s rudimentary, of course, but it is still astounding in what it is. H holds the figurine fast and turns the shoe over, expecting something. A worn imprint of a flower is stuck in the sole, but nothing else. No carving. No name. No hint. Officer H tucks the figurine back in the shoe and shakes his head.

“I think we should see Madam.”

“Oh, Madam,” Newt says with a hint of jealousy, but Officer H is already making his way to the door. “Hey, wait up!” 


	9. Circle Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mako would very much like to go home and spend time with Raleigh. It's just late enough, she decides to go do that.
> 
> Newt has a surprise for Officer H for their anniversary.

“What is this?” Mako turns the figurine over and over and over again, checking the limited details.

“I believe it’s Coyote Tango, madam,” Officer H answers. “The Jaeger piloted by—”

“I know that. I mean, what _is_ it. A child’s toy? A warning? A hobby for the jaeger replicant pilots? Why did he have this? Why was he hiding it?” She holds it closer, wiping her thumb across the short rectangular face of the wooden robot. She leans in and, to some deeply unknowable amusement, she sniffs it. No doubt she notes the earthy smell, the deep soil and dust, the artificial sting of the lacquer. H is delighted in some way that she was drawn to the same idea. To understand.

“I’m not sure,” Officer H answers dutifully.

He is standing at the edge of her office, arms folded at the head of his cane, coat on, collar turned up. He had time enough to rake his hair to the side and mute Newt in his pocket. The patch on his shoulder tried to open up when he was bumped in the halls by another officer, but he expects its gummed up with enough glue that it’ll hold until they get home.

And he wants to get home.

He suspects Madam wants to get home too.

“What else?” she asks as she hands the item back to Officer H. “You went to archiving, yes? What do you know?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” H answers and steps forward to take the figurine. He drops it back into his pocket without thought. “There’s an old Blade Runner who worked with Rachael. Pentecost. The only real lead I had on him is done. Said he was retired. I have the name of the orphanage where the child was raised. I suspect I go there next.”

“You suspect correctly,” Mako answers, leaning back in her seat. She puts flat hands on her desk, regarding him. Is it strange that she looks so small in this office? That it is not enough for her in the same regards? Some more rain splatters the window behind her. She sighs and shakes her head. “It’s late. I’ve got forensic going over it once more before we put it in evidence. Chuck’s on detail when we lock it up. We need to retire that child, H.”

“Understood, madam.”

She waves him out, dismissing him for the day. He wants to ask if he should bother with the orphanage and she sees his hesitation. “Go _home_ , H. Nobody else is keeping our hours. Get some rest. You look like you need it.”

H bows his head. He is relieved. A few hours would be a delight. He thumbs Newt, knocking his hand against the wooden figurine before he heads out. “Thank you, Madam.” She nods, and he feels that, despite the facts, he has accomplished something. Earned something. H bites back any smile or laughter until he is back on the street on his way to his apartment.

\---

The door shuts and, in that singular moment, there is nothing but the quiet pulse of a heartbeat. Is it strange that they have heartbeats too? Is it peculiar that they bleed? Is it wrong that that they breathe? Is it worse that she considers, for a moment, in that singular, perfect moment, that they are basically human? Same as she is?

Incorrect thoughts.

 _I should head to baseline_ , she thinks, and presses the fingerprint scan underneath her desk, the first line of defense for her desktop. She almost laughs before she pushes her face up towards the watery scanner, a grid mark dissecting her into basic features. Eyes, nose, mouth. Skin.

“Lieutenant Mori,” the mechanical voice chimes, more efficient a greeting, before her computer comes to life and spreadsheets, reports, and _emails_ flood the monitors. More replicants to be retired. More arrests to be made. More cases to solve, determining who has gone rogue and who is still on her side. Already, she can sense the hovercars passing by her milky-stained windows. It is what they call medium-grade-raining. More persistent than the foggy drops of the day-to-day precipitation. Raleigh will be underneath that ugly old blanket, wrapped up in his itchy wool sweater his older brother knitted before the war. He’ll be undoing the caps to his pills, give a heavy sigh before he spots their picture up on the mantle, and pops them all diligently with the glass of filtered water. A fireplace will be displayed on their wall with the hologram, faux fire crackling, before he reminds himself there’s a game on and switches the channel. She hates watching it, but she loves sneaking tiny cold hands underneath his sweater, where he yelps and pulls away. She delights in his warmth and his noise and his love, yes, even when he’s yelling at her in dual languages, before she curls up against his side.

It's so late.

Mako still looks at her desk, at the corners of the room without moving her head, before she presses the heels of her hands into her eyes and sighs heavily. They sting. The day has been too long, and she could very easily spend hours yet going over her reports. She should. But it’s cuddle-rain out there and maybe she needs more reminders than just pictures and memories to know what she is fighting for.

They live closer to Sherman Oaks, a silly name for a metal landscape. Mako has an umbrella up when she parks. They have a house instead of the industrial apartments that are both more affordable and closer to the hospitals. It’s not like the city hasn’t crept up to their doorstep either. It’s that the house, slim, pressed in against its neighbor, is theirs. It’s _theirs_. She doesn’t even mind the heavy traffic.

Big blocks of light stripe the second level. Mako smiles up at them, admiring it a moment too long that she misses the front door sliding open.

“You’ll catch a cold,” the familiar voice calls out, and Mako tips her umbrella back out of the way. She rests it against her shoulder, almost clicking her heavy black boots together at the heels. “ _Ie ni hairu. Samuidesu._ ”

“You’re always cold,” Mako teases and steps up to their circular doorway, shaking out her umbrella over cement steps. She curves with his body as Raleigh presses in and kisses her cheek, planting three of them against her skin and the hard mental shell she wears for work crackles and breaks. She laughs.

As predicted, the game is on in their living room, flickering near-silent on the smooth wall. Raleigh grabs a remote and turns down the old records he was playing for likely most of the afternoon. There, on the couch, the gray and pink quilt. There, on his shoulders, the blue wool sweater. There, the pills. There, his smile. There. Here. Now.

Mako circles her arms around him and kisses away the funny medical taste on his tongue, happy to predict her husband’s movements so well. He smiles with patchy-beard growth and hugs her back, carrying her to the couch to flop down in the overwhelming musty smell that is _him_.

“Boots on the couch,” Raleigh mumbles against her and she sighs, rolling her eyes, and kicks them off. “ _Arigatō._ ”

“ _Damatte kisushite._ ”

Raleigh laughs, obliging with another happy peck to her lips and cheeks and eyelids. He stops when something catches in his throat and he quickly scrambles up instead of coughing directly into Mako’s face. She chases after him anyways, rubs his back, presses a cheek to his trembling shoulder.

It is a painful reminder, up to and including when Raleigh wipes away a spot of blood from his lips. This is what happens when they send humans to the Breach. Yes, of course she fell in love with him when they were both cadets. Yes, of course she loved him still when the first rig malfunctioned, taking his brother and scarring Raleigh across the ribs and arm in the process. Yes. She loves him now.

After arguments and fights to keep him here, after he took the prospective drone to the gate and was violently pulled into the first oculus of the Breach. When he fought to return, tooth and nail they said, despite heavy radiation poisoning. After all that, she has him now and she does everything she can to keep him. That’s important. The hours are long and perhaps there is a darkness beginning to settle at the idea of retiring replicants, these people she has come to work with so closely. But she cannot and will not cross that boundary completely. Because of Raleigh.

This is what happens when they don’t rely on the replicants. And perhaps that is something that has painted her vision of them over the years. Send replicants. Ship them all off world if it means protecting this small bubble of safety she has found here, now.

She whispers simple, peaceful things to him until the fit passes. He sighs, a smile already fixed in place as he sits back and curls up against her. She smiles, too.

“Sorry,” he says and laughs. She makes room for him so he can lay in her lap. She brushes back his hair, tracing little circles over his forehead.

“Don’t be.”

\---

“Well, I am,” Officer H says anyways, carefully stripping off his coat. He holds it on his arm, locking the door behind him.

“Don’t be!” Newt says again, disappearing somewhere in the kitchen. To what end, H can’t decide, but he’s too busy trying to undress without further discomfort. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”

H smiles. His shoulder is hot and stiff and his leg is cold and stiff and his head is, well, not those two things. He smiles anyways. He is relieved to have the evening and goes off to the shower, standing stock still beneath the oppressive torrent. There is far less red going down the drain. He pokes the patch from Kaidonovsky’s knife—almost completely healed. He was just being paranoid earlier when that _unsavory_ fellow body-checked him outside Madam’s office.

H slides on a comfortable shirt from Newt’s half of the closet and a simple pair of slacks. He isn’t hungry, but he hears Newt rummaging with something in the kitchen, the arm rig whirring across the ceiling despite the fact that he had no need for it anymore.

“What in the world are you getting up to?” H asks casually, smoothing out his shirt as he steps out of the bathroom. “Newt? You don’t—”

H tightens his fist around his cane without thinking. He reaches back, but he has put away his issued pistol. A question begins to bubble, fierce and protective, when Newt steps out of the kitchen with the ceiling rig carrying a bottle with him.

“Hey, I can’t find any matching…oh! Hey!” Newt beams, dropping his hologram glasses, which disappear before they crash to the floor. “Nessa! You made it!”

“ _You_ called her?” H asks, his throat warbling at the turn of events.

Vanessa pushes away from the door, dropping a slim shoulder bag on the kitchen table. “Apologies, Officer. Your NEwT system—”

“Just Newt,” H says.

“Sometimes he calls me Newton. You know, as in Isaac?” Newt flickers and stands next to H, bumping into him. “Gifted me my own little nickname for our first anniversary. I’m like 93% certain it was an accident, but it kinda stuck. Isn’t he cute?”

“I prefer the differentiation,” H grumbles, lowering his face in a sign of both submission and embarrassment. “Why didn’t you tell me you were inviting someone over?”

“Hey,” Newt says as he points up at the ceiling rig. “You got me a gift. Why can’t I return the favor?”

“Because you—”

H isn’t sure how to finish his sentence, so he opts not to.

“Look,” Vanessa says, making herself comfortable on the couch. Newt sits next to her, patting the seat to his right. H remains standing. “We don’t have to make this awkward. You’re cute, for a Blade Runner.” H doesn’t roll his eyes or protest like he feels deep in his guts he wants to. He remains motionless. “And your…uh…Newt here is very excited about—”

“Please,” H says, cutting her off. “I’m not entirely sure what Newt told you or why he would…I don’t mean to make this awkward.”

Newt laughs, glitching up to stand next to H.

“You’re a pro at it, babe. It’s okay.”

H closes his eyes, holding back further comment. He is so much better at all of this at work. Why is it, in the comfort of his home, with Newt, he becomes this crumbling, fumbling mess of a thing? How is that possible?

Love. Or perhaps imprecision in the coding.

He might stick with Love.

“Look, it’s a little weird, fine. But she’s _perfect_ ,” Newt whispers against H, glancing back at Vanessa on the couch, who gives a little wave. “And I love that you got me the emanator. I seriously love it. I get to be with you all the time and see what you do and the world and just…I want to return the favor. And I have nothing. I just have you. This is the only way I can, like, _be_ with you! I want you, man. Do you want me too?”

“Of course, I do,” H answers with a little huff. “And we are! I thought. Well, I thought we were.”

“We are,” Newt answers. “Totally. But….”

Newt steps back and nods at Vanessa, who pushes up from the couch. She moves closer until she is standing _inside_ Newt, and the discordant imagery morphs and molds. Newt smiles, but it’s punched through by Vanessa’s nose like the fin of a shark skimming water when she looks down. She reaches up and undoes a few snaps in her hair, flattening it out until she and Newt are the same height. H swallows painfully, uncomfortable while watching Newt be absorbed like this.

“Sorry, just a sec. Just need to sync,” Newt says, clear and happy.

Vanessa waves her hand up in front of them and, with a few passes, Newt’s hand layers perfectly over the top of hers. They turn their heads, slipping, aligning, syncing. It takes a moment, and Newt keeps laughing, but eventually, an imperfect skin settles atop Vanessa.

“Newton,” H breathes out at last, unaware he had been holding his breath through most of it. Newt shrugs, laughing so hard, he doubles over out of Vanessa’s torso. He pops back up, settling over her skin. Another shimmering, swimming moment and everything settles into place. “Newt, I’m not sure—”

“Hold on,” Newt says. The two walk over, moving in harmony. He can still see Vanessa sometimes underneath, melding, shifting, but Newt has impeccable mapping capabilities and takes her place just as quickly. H isn’t sure how to feel anymore. He stands still until they are close, too close, and puts his hand out to put it around their waist. He closes his eyes and feels a body there and can pretend. _God_ , he can pretend.

God.

Lips meet his own and he gasps softly at the contact, the pressure he’s dreamed about too often to be anything other than an obsession. If he keeps his eyes closed, the hands that glide up and cup his jaw, the fingers that curl up behind his ears, they could be Newt’s. Softer lips, of course, and longer, slender fingers where he always imagined them rough and beautiful. He chases after the tentative tongue without thinking, dropping his cane to hold them. There were fewer sounds, the muted world outside an impressive backdrop. They pull back so H can catch his breath.

“Bedroom,” Newt says.

“Of course, darling,” H answers, daring to open his eyes. The amorphous image isn’t as unpleasant this time. He strokes Newt’s cheek. He strokes Vanessa’s cheek. He pushes back in to kiss them both, glad that the replicant half can help them maneuver towards the bedroom, shucking clothes in their wake.

\---

Newt sits on the foot of the bed, legs folded and staring off at nothing. He’s hardly there. He’s anchored by the sound of heavy, sleepy breathing. H is on what he likes to call Newt’s side of the bed, curled up and spooning Vanessa. She doesn’t hold H’s hands like Newt thinks he would. She helps put a pillow under his bad leg, and that’s something Newt definitely knows he would do.

Something far, far, _far_ away is calling him. Lightyears away. He doesn’t go there often, because he doesn’t know if he can come back. He looks through a hastily patched camera feed, bouncing over the military-grade security systems in place, shaking hands with other AIs that try to stop him. Newt found the feed a few months back. He finds his favorite camera, turning it by his will on a well-articulated mount. He stares out through the space station, pointing the ship until it is perfectly aligned with the giant oculus of the Breach. There’s little to no care what the crew must think of the slight deviations in the flight pattern. Newt just wants to see. He stares. He stares. He—

Vanessa stirs first. She breathes sharply, quietly, and carefully pulls herself out of H’s arms. The bed shifts, but it does nothing to shift Newt at the end, who looks like he’s in sleep mode with his eyes open.

“Newt?” she calls out, just before she reaches up and pulls a discrete tracker out from under her tongue. She watches him a moment, but he doesn’t blink or anything, and she decides he’s not online yet. She steps over to Officer H’s discarded cane and unscrews the rubber foot before she presses the tracker into the bottom. She closes it back up and finally begins to hunt down her clothes.

The NEwTs—Neurologically Enhanced-AI with Temporal Security systems, a fairly common companion AI that had been paired with a hologram program to sell to market—have almost always been notoriously easy to hack if anyone has the serial launch code and access to the home portal. Vanessa spotted it plugged into the wall back when they were undressing. She looks at it now as she fetches shirt and shorts and shoes. She toys with the idea of plugging into it but isn’t sure how easy it would be to escape before H wakes up. A silly risk. And, besides the fact, when she looks back into the bedroom, she can still see Newt just sitting there near H. With his stylized tattoos. With his beautiful mapping program used last night. It’s nothing close to love that stops her, of course. It’s something warm and to the left of that. Admiration, maybe. Fondness, perhaps. Commiseration. Pity.

It’s pity.

Vanessa continues gathering her clothes, noting her thin blue panties that had been tossed at the edge of the bed are now just in front of Newt on the floor. She has to cross in front of him to retrieve them. He finally stirs, laughing before he catches himself and stifles it. They both look to Officer H, who simply turns away from the warm spot Vanessa had abandoned not too long ago. He grabs a pillow and holds it against his chest. She wonders how often he has down this. How often Newt slips into the place of the pillow and presses against him while they sleep. It’s bizarre, but then, so are they, a little. She learned last night they had _wedding rings_ for each other. She found out because Newt put his on in his hologram and H had kissed their hands with such reference, it felt obscene to be witness to it. More obscene than having him between their legs.

“Good morning,” she says, a shadow in the blue morning light. “Sorry to disturb you.”

“That’s alright,” Newt answers. He watches her, not getting up to help. Not that he could. “You heading out?”

“I have a shift in an hour,” Vanessa lies. She shimmies into the panties, jumping into the shorts next. Newt leans back in his tattered jeans and a worn black shirt. _So much easier to get dressed when you’re nothing but a program._ He looks thoughtful mixed with a touch of sadness. He’s wonderful, actually. “Hey, Newt? Can I ask you a question?”

Newt perks up, flickering off the bed to stand near her. She’s not surprised by it at all.

“Nessa, seriously. You were _inside_ me last night. You can ask me anything.”

They share a quiet moment of laughter. H is a heavy sleeper. He doesn’t shift. He doesn’t make a sound. He could be dead if they couldn’t clearly see the rise and fall of his naked back. A thin line of scar tissue peaks over his hip, which he’s hooked around the second pillow between his knees. She remembers the rough texture of his skin, the way he moaned when she pet it and soothed it with hands and lips. She thought she could feel where the bolts held his hip together. She thought Newt pulled away a few times to ignore it, to leave it alone. So she had.

“How long have you two been together?” Vanessa asks as she fights with one of her shoes.

“Oh. Uh. Three years,” Newt answers and a calendar pops up beside his head, a date circled in the projected widget. “Three years, two months, twenty-six days, if you want the complete truth of it. He likes numbers. Actually, so do I.” Newt beams and waves the widget away. “But I really _really_ like biology. Seriously, if I could? I’d be right up there on the Juno-XV. They have the most state of the art lab I’ve ever seen. Oh m god, dude, okay. They have this molecular scanner, right? And I’m not talking….”

Vanessa tucks the information away like a slip of paper in her bra strap as Newt continues to ramble about things she can only pretend to understand. The date of his likely purchase is a secret worthy of blackmail. More than that.

 “Hey, Newt?” Vanessa asks. She’s crouched down to get her other shoe on. They’re tight, ridiculous things. She’d rather a pair of ugly boots that slipped on and off easier than silk.

Newt hums, caught up in his rambling. “Oh, sorry.”

“No, I just wanted to know….” Vanessa stands up as soon as the shoe is on, adjusting her suspenders. She smiles at him, sharp as a knife. She never means to smile like this. She never means to be sharp. It is merely a necessity. “You said before, right? That I _got_ it. What did you mean?”

Newt flickers again and is standing next to her once more, holding out his hand. She looks down and puts her hand atop it. The closest they have to a handshake, she supposes.

“Hey, what do I know, right? We’re manufactured.” Newt motions to include the three of them and laughs a little, rubbing his weightless thumb over her palm. He has that distant look again, like he is being pulled away in a vacuum. “But someone. Someone out there was _born_. But they’re still like you. And him. And I guess….” Newt squints through thick-framed glasses. An odd stylistic choice for a NEwT system, but then again, perhaps appropriate for the Blade Runner with a cane. “I guess you do kinda know, don’t you?”

Vanessa squeezes down, meaning to hold Newt’s hand, pinching her own fingers together. She leans forward and bumps his hologram forehead.

“I’m glad you know too,” she says softly.

They stay quiet until Newt fidgets and pulls back, scrubbing the back of his head. He looks practically _bashful._ It’s a delight.

“Hey, you think he had fun?” he asks casually. Vanessa regards him as she picks up her bag from the kitchen table.

“Newt. Seriously. He came three times, love. I think he had plenty of fun.”

They laugh. They don’t touch, not like they did before. They have little else to say and Vanessa makes her way to the door. She only stops as he’s unlocking it. “Keep him safe, yeah?”

“Course I will. You keep safe too. We’ll be seeing you around, Nessa. I know it.”

Vanessa leaves the apartment with Newt’s help and heads out. There’s people to call on. She needs to see who’s on deck to deliver her information to. She wonders how long they would have to wait and how difficult it will be before Officer H and his Newt were out before they can break into his apartment and destroy the main PPDC console for his NEwT system. Even more dreadful a thought on how they would get his emanator. _Wedding rings_. He’s absolutely the type to keep the emanator on his person at all times, Vanessa is certain. But it must be done. The bloody things are too damn easy to hack. And if they knew, what did the other side know? She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she kept her head up and her shoulders straight on her way back to the Hangar. Maybe Jake would finally be back to tell her all about his unfortunate date with his own Blade Runner. She hopes. She hopes he has something good. She hopes its better than going through archives to figure out the exact model to take out that Newt. _Newton._ He _named_ the thing. Dreadful, dreadful, necessary trouble _that_ will be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vanessa is not a bad guy. Circumstances are just a hell of a thing sometimes, you know?


	10. Fingerprints at Fingertips

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a very important call going out for Lieutenant Mori's Blade Runner division. Something terrible has happened at the precinct and Newt might have a better idea of who is responsible.

“What’m I supposed to do with you?”

Nate slams Jake back against the wall, the shaved bit of his head bouncing off the brick. He winces, stars dancing over his eyes, blinding him to the rush as Nate closes the distance and kisses him hard. He can barely recover his breath to gasp as Nate’s hands push up his shirt. He can’t even answer. Not really. Jake’s just there, gripping the tough fabric of Nate’s coat near his shoulders, trying to pull him in closer to press his stomach flat to Nate’s skin.

This is their third meeting and the first time they finally make it to the stoop of a building. An alleyway had been their first “encounter.” Just behind a vendor stall their second. Jake thinks he can carry the Blade Runner up the stairs into a room next time. Too fast, that’s all. Jake bites at a bruised lip and Nate yelps, pulling back.

“You gonna ship me up to the stars?” he whispers, his voice fast and happy. “Send me off world?”

“Then I can’t have you anymore,” Nate answers back, crushing any distance between them.

There’s all this clattering noise down below and Jake swallows a moan, half-way between insatiable desire and resigned annoyance. He hates that part, actually. He doesn’t want to feel that. He tugs Nate’s chin up and steals another biting kiss to drive away the unsavory routine he is afraid this will begin to fall into.

The only thing that interrupts their flow is a persistent chirp from the Blade Runner’s bloody cell. It’s vibrating in his pocket and, honest, it’s kinda funny to think of getting to one of the Hangar’s rooms and picking out a vibrator they might like, but it’s not _that_ funny. It ain’t even good. It’s annoying. It’s annoying and Jake huffs, leaning back, pressing his cheek to the brick wall and closing his eyes.

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Answer it already so we don’t have no more distractions,” Jake says.

“It’s work.”

“Go on. Won’t say nothing.”

“Okay, but just…hold on.” Nate kisses Jake’s neck awkwardly, a sloppy apology. He holds up his pants from the belt and digs out the phone, pressing it up against his ear. He doesn’t wanna holochat and risk someone seeing him ‘bout to go down on a replicant in a poorly lit hallway. Jake gets it, honestly. Still hurts. “This is Lambert.”

There’s a pregnant pause, the most even breathing Jake can imagine from someone he’d been pawing at not moments ago. He opens his eyes to study the Blade Runner, who has stilled, wide-eyed and haunted.

“I’ll be there.” He nods for nobody’s benefit. “Twenty minutes, Lieutenant. …Of course.” He clicks the phone off and drops his head down to Jake’s chest. Without thinking, Jake cups him, sliding hands to the nape and holding him. He kisses the top of Nate’s head and pulls back before skull meets nose and somebody ends up with something broken. Gushing blood instead of gushing something else. “I gotta go.”

“Coulda guessed that, mate. Work and all.”

“Somebody….” Nate shakes his head, going paler than usual. They step away from the stoop, almost dancing. Footsteps angled awkwardly back towards an alley like it’s second nature now. White boys already got a disadvantage, but Nate looks like a bloody ghost. “I gotta go.”

Jake sighs, but he gets it.

“Hey, hold on. You’ll trip over your knickers.”

Jake grins, putting on a show, and helps belt Nate back into place. He expects to be left there, dumped near a dumpster with a semi and a hole in his schedule, cold from the encroaching rain. So he’s surprised when Nate holds Jake’s jaw and kisses him. It’s a tender thing, warm and solid. A goodbye kiss from a lover instead of a hasty retreat from a john.

“I’ll see you later,” Nate says.

“Oh, promises, promises, Officer.”

Nate looks like he wants to say something. Bit of banter biting his tongue. But he holds onto it and almost winks before his fingers leave Jake’s cheek and he’s off for his car. Jake watches him. He looks up towards fire escapes and electric cables and holographic awnings crisscrossing the alley above, the pitter-patter of heavier rain slipping through all that electric and metal and mental mess up there. He pushes out a wet feeling same as rain smatters his face and he decides, _fuck it_ , and heads back to the Hangar to see if there’s any company there that can distract him.

\---

It seems almost wasteful to take another shower in the morning, when he had one last night, but H allows himself the time. Newt busies himself in the living room, writing little notes to himself, reminders about what he’s starting to learn about the Breach by his quick and very much illegal sojourns up to the space station camera. His eyes flicker blue as he steals a moment from the patched feed to the Kaiju Archives, flipping through all those samples they have. Is nobody brave enough to carve into them and _figure them out_? They’re just amassing all those delicious specimens for what? For a museum? For trophies? Newt makes a buzzy hum of annoyance when he pushes his hand through the whiteboard app H has built into his apartment for him.

Officer H is too nice. Everybody says so. Literally nobody says so, but Newt thinks if he just had a moment to go out and make friends and then brought those friends back to meet his “husband?” They’d all say he’s too nice. Maybe the replicants he retires would even say it, just before they got blasted through the skull. Newt banks on it.

There’s a pass of a big advert outside, lighting the apartment up in cool white tones. Newt squints and smiles, covering his eyes, even if the light disrupts him and makes him translucent like some ghost. He doesn’t mind. He looks up again as H is leaving the bedroom, a towel over his head, which he is lazily scrubbing at.

It’s quiet. Between them and their neighbors. Newt puts on a record without prompting, an old song of an older remake by Elvis. Everybody loves to rip off the King. But the melody _is_ nice and it helps mask the…the quiet. The weird, weird quiet. The awkwardness that lingers between them, after sharing a night together for the first and perhaps only time they can possibly accomplish that. Not unless Newt can skim off some more credit to pay for the service again.

It’s not wrong. It’s not bad or shameful. It’s not even dirty. It’s just.

Awkward.

Newt slips into the tight squeeze of the kitchen and hops up onto the counter. He bounces bare feet against the cabinets, delighting in the light _thump, thump, thump-thump_ of his foot, staring at his knees while Officer H busies himself with the coffee pot. They don’t look at each other. Not right away. Not until H tilts his cup towards Newt and asks in a sweet, sleep-heavy voice, “Would you like a cup?”

It’s beautiful in its simplicity. H always plays so well at Newt’s humanity, the sap. Again. He’s too nice. He’s too perfect. Newt licks his lips and remembers what it’s like to get to kiss him and, by the little dark flicker of H’s eyes, he is remembering the same thing.

They laugh.

The morning unfolds more pleasantly from then, after the little tense moment has shattered and died at their feet. H makes his coffee, pulls a frost-burned protein meal out of the freezer, and stands next to the microwave as it turns and turns and turns. Newt stays up on the counter and begins rattling off his theories on the latest sample he saw come through the Kaiju archives, codename: Otatchi.

“You know what is wild about this one? This one, babe, oh my god. It was preg—”

The low, warm tones of Officer H’s cell goes off and they both pause on principle, turning attention to the tiny cubby/desk/clutter drawer where he had left it to charge on the fastcharge wireless pad.

“Sorry,” Newt says, tugging his leg up out of the way as H passes by to grab it. “Madam?”

H nods and thumbs the phone on, the holographic icon of Lieutenant Mori flipping upwards from the glass eye above his screen. She turns and centers quickly. It’s apparent that she’s been frazzled by something, her eyes popping at the sight of H, like she did not expect him to answer. Ridiculous thought. He will always answer. He must.

“We need you down at the precinct,” Lieutenant Mori says, her voice crisp.

“Of course.” H sets his mug down and the microwave beeps that it’s done behind them. Newt leans back out of sight, tiptoeing out into the living room.

“Now,” Madam corrects.

“Of…course.” H barely twitches his lip in question, but he should not have hesitated. He knows he should not have hesitated. Madam turns her head slightly, a bold stripe of blue falling away from her cheek, but whatever concern she has disappears in the next breath.

“There’s a body down in the morgue. One of our own. Someone broke in last night during the transfer. I’ll explain once you are here,” she says and the line goes dead before H can respond.

Officer H blinks. His thumb feels numb, even as he clicks the phone off and sets it back down on the charging plate.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Newt whispers, breaking up the cold silence. “Someone—”

H grabs up his cane and goes straight to his room to get dressed.

“Babe?”

They’re out the door in under five minutes. Both coffee and protein meal are left in the kitchen to grow cold, to wait for them to come home.

\---

Someone is already spraying down the halls as H follows the well-tread lines to the forensic lab. Coppery rust stains splash up towards mid-thigh, power washed back to the slightly dingy white. No matter how hard they clean them, they will never be pristine. It’s too much effort. It’s a janitorial staff that does not care. Not even replicants, just the poorest of the poor who need something to do as they struggle to survive on a dying planet.

How easy it would be to trip the person. Bash their head open on the wall. One down. Billions to go.

H rounds the corner and walks in to see Lieutenant Mori and the tech, Mr. Choi, standing over one of the terminals to review feedback. There’s a few other Blade Runners waiting orders. Another replicant assigned to Lieutenant Mori. H knows there are other replicants on the force, other Blade Runner teams, but he’s stuck with the mostly-human task force.

Stuck with.

H closes his eyes a moment and finds his focus, his center, his calm.

He can’t afford these….

Thoughts.

“It was Hansen,” Lieutenant Mori says when she sees him come in. Mr. Choi turns to him, tight mouth and eyes drawn down in a reserved grief that H can’t quite seem to place. He looks tired. He clenches a fist and H notices the rosary beads wrapped thrice around wrist and fingers, a tattoo incidentally breaking up the pattern of beads and skin.

“Any leads?” one of the other Blade Runner asks, a gentleman with deep grooved dimples carved out of his cheeks and steel eyes.

The group sits back to show the security feed. Empty hallways clocked at 2 am last night. Chuck Hansen pushes a cart, head down, not moving fast but not labored by anything. Taking his time in the quiet hours, likely. He looks like he’s humming something, but there is no audio. He lifts his head and ducks into the lab, bumping the corner and jerks forward to catch one of the remains from falling off. A piece of shin. He looks like he’s laughing, turning the thing over, impressed by his own speed. He enters the lab completely and there’s a distortion in the corner of the screen before it jumps ahead twenty-three minutes. Chuck’s on the ground, the back of his head caved in, a black spot spreading out beneath him. His chin is tucked in neatly to his chest, blood spilling from eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Some terrible blow to the back of the head ended him in a moment. H does not know yet if he suffered much, but the sight makes all of them inhale, straighten up, clench fists. Madam is the only one who does not react.

“What…what about the other feeds?”

“Same missing time,” Lieutenant Mori says softly.

“Security check points? Surrounding cameras of anybody entering the building?”

“We’re going over them,” Lieutenant Mori answers and turns to face Officer Lambert.

“What about next of kin?” another asks, and the group turns their attention to him. It’s Mr. Choi who speaks, running his thumb across his bottom lip, rosary beads and all.

“He has a dog, far as I remember. Nobody, like…no, wait, shit.” He finally looks up at Lieutenant Mori, and the fluttering hand that can’t find anywhere to rest drops down to his bow tie. “His dad.”

“Mr. Hansen is retired.”

H didn’t realize he had said anything until eight pairs of eyes are on him. He grips the head of his cane, standing tall. His pocket chirps and he reaches into silence it, bumping the little wooden figurine.

"Not in that way. Retired from the.... He's alive."

“Clear the room,” Lieutenant Mori says, freezing the images on the terminal before she stands and raises her arms. “Everyone except Officer H.”

Someone feints jabbing H in the arm as they pass. The one Blade Runner, Officer Lambert, purses his lips and shakes his head as he’s forced out of the conversation. He would have been closer to Officer Hansen than H ever could be, if they were friends at all. H doesn’t imagine they were. There’s an unspoken divide between the first generation of Madam’s team and the second, even if a scant year paints the divide. A year feels like a decade these days, doesn’t it?

H waits for the room to rise and part around him, leaving Madam and, oddly, Mr. Choi in the chair near the terminal. She puts a hand on Mr. Choi’s arm to keep him seated. He sits back and begins nibbling at the edge of his index fingers pressed together in thought. Present, yes, but not completely. The worry plays out so plainly on his face. Such a rare treasure.

“H?” Lieutenant Mori asks, her voice gentle even as she tucks her hands behind her back, taking on a pristine military stance. She’s shorter, but as she lifts her head and stares him down, H feels small. “What do you know?”

“It was a replicant!”

H staggers back as Newt practically leaps out of his pocket, walking forward on his arrival until he is standing directly in front of Lieutenant Mori. H stabs into his pocket again to mute the emanator, but it’s already too late. Lieutenant Mori peeks around Newt’s projection, too shocked to scowl.

“What is he doing h—”

“Look, it’s obvious by the attack and, uh, duh, if the LAPD security feeds have been hacked, you’ve got maybe three companies in the city that can do that, but let’s not beat around the bush,” Newt says, shifting from one foot to the other. H feels his throat crackle and burn with reflux, his words failing him. His only apparent and correct action is inaction. Unfeeling. Patient. Obedient. Desperately in love and afraid if he shows it, it’s over. “You’ve got one player in the game, Madam, and that’s Gottlieb. Right? I mean, who else is going to steal old replicant remains?”

“H, turn off—”

“The PPDC have their fingerprints all over the code!” Newt holds up his hands, looking back at H through the lattice of his fingers. The cheeky bastard has put on his wedding ring again. H breaths hard, leaning forward, perhaps an inch and no more. “I can feel it. I can see it. Hold on, let me show you. Please? Please.”

“H, seriously? Your NEwT System thinks he’s a hacker now?” Mr. Choi asks, swiveling the chair back to look around Newt.

“I don’t think anything, buddy, I know,” Newt says.

He walks up to the terminal and thrusts his hand into side of it. He buttons his lips together, stretching up on his tip toes, his tattoos flashing a brilliant blue. He looks pained. H steps forward again, holding a hand out, but the screen flashes back towards the missing footage, back further, and a new program opens up as lines of code dance across the screen. Newt “breathes.” He doesn’t need to. Or, perhaps, in his way, now. He needs to. He smiles and wipes his forehead with his free hand.

“There. There!” Newt pulls his hand out of the terminal and taps the screen, which crackles white under his touch before it settles back into place. “PPDC security. Guaranteed.”

“How did you—”

“ _Newton_ ,” H says quietly, his voice dipping down, rich and dark as he finds the bottom of his resolve. He widens his eyes, just so, and Newt laughs, appearing next to H immediately. H ducks his head in apology to Lieutenant Mori as Newt mumbles a quick half-apology. He is ecstatic to find his sincerity. “Madam, I…apologies.”

Lieutenant Mori stands still a moment, studying the lines of code. He touches Mr. Choi’s arm, nods, and steps away.

“Thank you,” she says. It’s as surprising to H and Newt as it is to Mr. Choi. Perhaps even surprising to his Madam. “You have sped up our search considerably. Tendo? Will you be able to work with what…I’m sorry. Do you prefer Newton?”

“Newt’s perfect, Madam,” Newt says and bounces up on his toes. Lieutenant Mori nods.

“Newt. Thank you. Tendo will go over what Newt has uncovered. I’m not sure yet what we can do with this. If it is Gottlieb. If it’s anyone high up….”

“I could retire them, Madam,” H answers diligently.

Lieutenant Mori regards him and he thinks she does it favorably. She smiles; it makes her so much younger when she smiles.

“I know you would. You’re going to the orphanage today, yes?”

“Of course.”

“The child is still your priority. Let us handle this mess,” she says and starts walking them to the door, her hand to accommodate both Officer H and Newt. It is a bit ridiculous to treat Newt so kindly after his outburst, after revealing so plainly what he is.

_And what is that exactly?_

_Extraordinary._

“Thank you, Madam,” H says at the door. He pats his pocket, Newt already safe inside. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything.”

“Yes. You will,” she says, but she’s smiling. He forgets, for a moment, that one of their own has been brutally murdered in here. That the vital remains of Rachael are missing. That something terrible looms large on the horizon. He thinks Lieutenant Mori…he thinks Mako can forget for a moment too. He grips his cane tightly and leaves the precinct. The flight to the orphanage should prove interesting, if Newt’s in a chatty mood.

He is.

He always is.

He’s brave and beautiful and begrudgingly ignorant of the woman slipping into their home, right then. Right then. Right then, opening the home console and cloning the system onto a handheld device that will show her everything she needs before she snaps the old antennae, cutting him off from it completely. He can come home, and he should, but he can’t come _home_. To end him? To save his life. To spy on his love.

Love is complicated.

To be loved is simple.

Perfect. Obedient. _Loved_.


	11. Out Here is Garbage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Officer H and Newt make their way to the orphanage, where they hope to find where the replicant child was kept when an unfortunate accident tries to blow them off course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New Year, new chapter! Huzzah!

It is, actually, impressively quiet in the hovercar. Officer H programs in the orphanage he looked up in public records and leans back, watching the skyline. Not as a means to keep himself from being sick, which is a common occurrence in these flying vehicles. Nor is he staring to concentrate on the “road,” on the path that is currently divesting most of the attention of their vehicle. He stares as a means of focus. Of calm. Of returning to his self. He thinks Newt will interrupt him. He expects it. He doesn’t dare say it, but he wants it. And, instead?

Nothing.

It’s not ten minutes on a half-hour flight before he glances over at the empty seat and asks, almost unsure himself, “Darling?”

There isn’t even a chirp, a little melodic recognition from his pocket. H leans to the side and draws out the emanator, setting it down on his armrest.

“Are you pouting?”

He pokes one of the buttons, wondering if it lost a charge and if Newt had to zap back to the house. But these things run on ionized trilithium charge; they should last years and years without having to go back on a charging plate. He turns it over to make sure there is no flashing red light, no mar in the casing. He ignores his own console completely, both the maps and the readouts of the area just as he is crossing over the last edge of the city limits. Out past the solar farms, in the opposite direction of the protein farms such as the one Kaidonovsky kept. No, out here is a wasteland. Garbage. Miles and miles of it, rotting away, rusting away. People live here, too, swallowed up in the wake of the landfills, of the rich dumping into their neighborhoods before they abandoned the planet. A last _fuck you_ to the impoverished. And more and more keeps coming out here, sent out on automated trucks from the cities. There is no way to reclaim it. It just is. It is the lost. It is the lonely. It is a perfect place to keep an orphanage in the gutted remains of a tankard or a piecemeal building made of trailers and derelict banks.

Newt’s emulator is quiet.

Newt is quiet.

Officer H does not panic, because he cannot panic, but he almost holds his thumb over the main button, wondering if it needs a reset. Wondering if maybe even the threat of a reset will wake Newt up and it is a cruel, accidental thought that makes H pause when the little white circle in the center spins and Newt’s unique-patterned song sings at him. Officer H grips the remote and pushes out a captive breath as Newt appears next to him.

“Sorry, sorry!” Newt waves his hands a moment, adjusting his holographic glasses, running his fingers through his hair that stands up in defiance of gravity, if ever gravity could affect him. “I was lightyears away.” He grins and rests both hands atop H’s. “What’s up? We almost there?”

“No,” H says, visibly relaxing. He sets the remote back down. “Apologies. I missed you and—”

“You missed me?” Newt laughs. It’s a light sound, skittering through the cab. Some might say it has a slight fray to it, a screech, but H loves it. “Dude, I’m, like, always here. You can’t miss me. You’re not _allowed_ to miss me.”

He’s teasing. He’s teasing especially because they went to the precinct and Newt always says H is a bit stiffer, a bit more buttoned-up whenever he has to go there. _Baseline_ , he will say next and, _oh, so we’re pretending to be humans now? Okay. Great. Because I thought you forgot how to smile there for a second, babe, and I was gonna die without that._

He should say that. H is ready to tease him back this time, which he doesn’t do as eloquently, but Newt just sighs as he settles too far back into the seat and has to readjust until he’s not bleeding into the upholstery. Something has upset him. The murder? Meeting Madam? Vanessa, perhaps?

“What’s troubling you?”

“Hmm?” Newt looks over, head resting at a comfortably odd angle, eyes half-lidded in thought or a facsimile of exhaustion. “Oh. Nothing, really.”

“Liar.”

“Don’t read me like one of your replicant runaways.”

“Shall I set up the Voigt-Kampff, darling? See how well you react to probing questions? Perhaps I can make you blush a—”

“I can turn that off,” Newt says, but he’s not playful. He’s just…resigned.

H closes his mouth. He touches the steering wheel, a useless, grounding gesture. The slate gray clouds brighten slightly as the sun reaches its zenith. The windshield is streaked from little snowflakes occasionally slapping the hovercar, an irregular storm not quite breaking. He can’t even pretend to be distracted by the hum of an engine. These machines don’t make as much noise until they have the kickback of earth beneath them. And, up here? In the clouds? In the dense smog of the world? They hardly have anything.

“Shit.”

The sound punches through the quiet and Newt is suddenly reaching for him again, passing effortlessly through Officer H’s hand. H looks down and holds his palm up and, not for the first time but perhaps in a long time, he is upset at how easily they phase through each other. Newt looks positively miserable. H feels it. He feels it acutely and it does not show on his face. Or perhaps it does, and his own façade is breaking and soon he won’t be so sure, so resolute, so stable. Soon, one of those other blade runners will be after him for stepping so far out of baseline. For being. Well. Human.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m tired and I have…look. I’m being a dick. I was going to tell you when we were done, but I figured out—”

The blast hits them on the left. It’s more a suction noise than a percussion, at least at first, swallowing up everything, stuffing H’s ear with cotton and numbing him before the violent explosion unfolds, stabbing him like a million needles. Newt has it even worse. He shifts, pixelating and fragmenting, his gasp a garbled reverb before he blinks out entirely.

“Newt!”

Another hit from the drone that has been tailing them. He should have known. He should have been looking. Some pieced together garbage unit that these people surviving out in the leftover landfills outside city limits have put together to take out anybody who dares cross their sky. If a vehicle falls and their occupants die, they can pick apart the carcass like vultures. They can sell parts. They can cook meat. Everything can be recycled out here, if given the right motivations.

The hovercar begins to plummet. Propulsion units completely out, and any aerodynamics that would help them slip through the air does nothing to slow their decent. H braces himself, his stomach up in his throat, his heart racing and then slowing and then slowing and then—

The impact slams H back and forward. He must thank Gottlieb for designing him to be so resilient, because the fall would have killed a lesser man. A human. Officer H cracks his skull against the steering wheel, blinking out himself, if for a moment. The EMP blast killed the hovercar sensors, as well as temporarily shorting Newt’s emanator. Nothing warms to wake him. There’s a hiss, steam trailing out beside him, mangled pieces of metal curled up under them from the crater they made. Something ticks and clicks in the engine, which will be difficult to reboot. But, for now, darkness. Quiet. Out cold.

Newt wakes first. A backup reboots and he sits up with a violent gasp, patting his chest a few times, as though searching for a heartbeat. There’s a noticeable glitch in his movements, a shutter stop effect before he realigns himself. His voice has a tin-tainted sound to it. He coughs, clearing his throat, fixing his projection algorithms. He _hurts_. God, a fucking EMP straight to his source. It’s small and it’s ignored, but it is nowhere near as fun as he could pretend it to be. For a laugh. Shock value.

Newt looks around, noting the fuzzy figures starting to descend from the piles of recyclables and refuse through the hovercards now filthy windows. He reaches out to touch the dead console, and his tattoos spark white in warning. He draws back. He glances over, about to ask H what the hell just happened, when he sees the familiar figure slumped over in his seat.

“H?” Newt’s on him, pressing against him. Pressing into him when he tries to feel for a heartbeat and he screams as his hands slide effortlessly through Officer H’s skin. Why couldn’t H be a robot? Newt can touch a goddamn robot. “H, baby. Wake up. Wake up, come on, we’ve got fucking hill people coming for us. Wake up. H! H, wake the fuck up!”

 Someone is at the door. They’ve wedged something into the seam and are beginning to pry it open. Without the safety locks from the onboard computer, the door opens, sliding upwards. A dark gloved hand reaches in, pushing the awful smell of the junkyard in with it, and they just get a hold of Officer H’s lapel before he effortlessly lifts his arm and fires two slugs into the assailant’s chest. The junkyard man goes down instantly.

“H!” Newt’s practically in his lap, damn the steering wheel, honestly, and makes a motion that could be squeezing H’s shoulder. He doesn’t smile. Officer H doesn’t say anything, but his hand passes delicately over Newt’s cheek before he grabs his cane and steps out of the vehicle.

The fall did him no favors. H leans heavily, shocked by the new pain up his side and threatening his spine. He does not stop, however, and raises his free hand easily to fire on the three individuals that are coming down the steep hill surrounding them. There are at least ten more coming and he imagines the rest just haven’t cleared the crest of their little garbage mountain range to join the others. He does not feel hopeless, because he cannot feel hopeless, but he wants nothing more than to go back into the car, close the door, and tell Newt he loves him until they are finally overrun.

The three assailants fall, same as the first, a bullet in their chests or their stomachs. Something sparks beside him as they begin to fire back. H turns to avoid a second blast, grunting as his leg threatens to give out. He stumbles awkwardly and readies another shot when the sky splits with a yellow light and the ground erupts.

Bodies go flying.

Whatever is doing this takes discriminate aim, picking off the groups in the junkyard that try to take Officer H and his vehicle. There is a delay in each, the amount of a quick inhale, but it cuts a surgical line. H only thinks a police drone has picked up on a downed vehicle. That perhaps one of the satellites is actually working this time, and he leans back against the hovercar as shrapnel sprays upwards, raining bits of dirt and steel and glass back down on them.

H thinks to thank Madam Mori when he can get his equipment back up. H thinks to duck into the hovercar’s interior and grabs the emanator, drops it into his pocket, and turns again to hold his double-grip pistol at anybody who would dare manage to sneak up on them.

Nobody does.

The drone, whoever is up there controlling it, has a keen eye.

\---

It is warm. It is warm with slipper shadows dancing up the walls, the reflections of water. It’s womb-like, if that can be believed. The room is deliriously warm, like a lovely drug. To clients, it might even be oppressive, but Dr. Gottlieb likes it warmer. His hands, he complains, don’t do well in the cold anymore. They hurt. They ache. They are less precise. They cut the wrong thing, stitch the wrong code, gift the wrong section of DNA to the wrong replicant line. Alice would hold his hands forever and keep them safe if he asked her to. She would be his hands. She sits in the dimly lit office anyways, in her pristine white dress suit, one leg draped over the other and crossed delicately at the heels. She won’t complain. She won’t sweat, she won’t falter. She is stoic. Perfection.

Loved.

There’s a thirty-minute gap between meetings to discuss sending new Jaeger Pilot teams up to Juthain in the Celephi System, the fourth planet marked for the expansion of the human race. An important step to conquering the stars, as Dr. Gottlieb would say. Has said. Has practically vowed. The gap in time is practically providence, as Alice sits down for a cup of tea and slides a view screen over her left eye. She had received an alert on her datapad and went to check what the fuss was about when she saw her blade runner plummeting from the sky.

Boys.

Children.

The NEwT program clone s working effortlessly, and for that she is grateful. Because, without her assistance, this pathetic officer would die, and she’d be lost without his trail to find the child of their precious Rachael.

She has not decided yet what will happen when they do find the child.

Dr. Gottlieb asked for it specifically.

And Alice.

And Alice is perfect. Now. Perfect and obedient and love. _Loved_. Dr. Gottlieb will find his precious missing piece and what will that make his Alice? Nothing.

Alice brings the small white china to her lips, barely blowing away the steam. She doesn’t blink, watching the tiny figures scurry across the broken landscape.

“Seventeen degrees north. One degree east. Fire. Six degrees south. Four degrees east. Fire. Five degrees….”

The rounds tear apart the people effortlessly. She could not ask for better work. Seventeen individuals explode under fire and she directs their satellite to the last group, pausing long enough to take a drink of the bitter tea. Dr. Gottlieb’s favorite brand. Alice forces herself to swallow. The china is set back on the little saucer, a tiny plink of a ceramics kiss.

“…Fire.”

Her view screen lights up in yellow and orange, blending seamlessly into the hazy atmospheric lighting of Dr. Gottlieb’s office. She watches Officer H step away from his vehicle, pistol up, no longer gawking at the sky to ascertain his savior.

“There,” Alice says softly, sweetly, sitting comfortably in the uncomfortable heat. A lover’s voice, she thinks. She knows. “Do your job. Find the child.”

\---

“H?”

“I think…I think it’s over, darling.”

“What the _fuck_?”

“Quite.”

The dust does not necessarily clear. It shifts, thins out, skates over the garbage ridge to settle into another valley. There are…too many casualties and H knows the paperwork for this at the precinct is astronomical. But not his division. And if Madam was the one who fired in the first place, she must know what she’s doing. He pats down the front of his sweater vest, rubs his hip a bit and starts up the ridge towards the place his GPS had said the orphanage was built. He would lean on Newt for support if he could but drags himself up all the same. Newt stays directly next to him, nearly glued to his side. H thinks he would let Officer H lean on him, if given the chance.

It is, in fact, an old ship, one of hundreds that were marooned up in an old shipyard and plucked apart by those fortunate enough to stake it. Numerous corrugated panels frame it, patching holes and creating a more cohesive shelter. H gets a better footing outside and is greeted by a dozen tiny malnourished souls, those that were thrown out like yesterday’s lunch. H says nothing, following them into the cool blue dark of the interior shell. He hears a man shouting, telling them to work harder, nickel first, then aluminum, then iron and steel. First one to fill quota gets double rations.

He sounds like he’s banging a pot together.

It sounds like rats rustling across the earth.

It sounds—

“Ah, dude,” Newt whispers, nearly breathless as they step into the harsh winter light, the halo that follows a man in too many layers, a patchy black beard, shiny skin.

It sounds miserable.

The floor stretches out seventy meters or more, with hundreds of small children kneeling and scurrying between tables piled high with garbage. More children come in with barrels of the stuff, dumping them into a collection that gets parsed down and spread out. Their fuzzy shaved heads gleam in the hard light. Their gray tunics are dull by dust, but frayed overuse, but age. Their tiny hands work and work and work and work and none of them look up, even as the little caravan brings in Officer H and Newt.

“Nickel first!” the man says again. There’s a slight warble to his voice. He’s shouted for so long. So long. His vocals can’t keep it up much longer, surely. Years of it. Probably grew up from it. “Then aluminum. Then—”

The man stops, startled enough that he takes two tiny, shuffling steps back. He does not grin. He does not try to hide anything, even his hands fidgeting up to a broken piece of metal dangling from a little strip of rip-chord around his throat.

“Sir,” the man says in his weak, fluttering voice. Either on the verge of tears or coughing. But his eyes are dry. A little lost yes. A little yellow around the edges, yes. But dry. “Welcome. You here for a tour?”

“Yes,” Officer H says, and fixes his grip on his cane before he steps away from the gaggle of children. The man moves to greet them and raises an open hand to the children that are crowding them. They duck out of the way, back towards their tables. H doesn’t even blink at the gesture.

“Well,” the man says and hobbles closer still, almost like he is mimicking H’s unusual gait. He fiddles again with his necklace. His hands are nearly gray with dirt and clay. His face is like molasses, with the same syrupy sheen, at least the parts around the patchy beard. “This is it. We’ve got two-hundred and seventy-three available today. All under eighteen. Mostly twelve and thirteen. I’ve got a few toddlers and we keep ‘em up in the nursery for now. You know. Nothing untoward, and I know what the labor laws are these days. They’re good kids, you know. They do good. I encourage ‘em to play, when we can. Playing’s hard and it wastes calories, so we—”

“I need to see your records,” H says. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out his badge.

The man’s hands go up towards his ears, palms out. There is a distinct mark across his palms, a jagged line that is now thin and pale over the years. His eyes dance down to the floor like a beaten dog.

“I swear it’s all in order, officer,” the man says. “I swear. It’s legal. We haven’t done nothing wrong. I’m doing what I can. You know. I’m—”

“I just need to see your records,” H says. “All accounts of the children who have been through here from 2025 onward, specifically the year 2033.”

The man’s thin eyebrows go up and down and stick there. But he nods, shuffles a little more, and points at two older kids. “Make sure we get through Wednesday’s pile before we move on,” he says and waves H and Newt to follow him. “Yeah, I keep thorough records, you know. I keep ‘em all. I’m not doing anything illegal. Never would get into that.”

His adamant phrasing leads Officer H to believe he, of course, has something illegal going on. But he is here specifically to find out where the replicant child was placed and he has no energy nor want to go digging further. This is far away from Los Angeles. This is not his jurisdiction. He is not the judge and executioner many claim him to be. He is just a blade runner.

They pass through a dark room, hot from the furnaces that keep the place alive. It’s smoky, and it stings to breathe. A necessary evil to keep warm, he supposes. They must burn the garbage they can’t sell back to metal works. And the man keeps walking, muttering to himself, about the children, about the work, about the world. Harmless chatter that dies before it reaches H’s ear. He only follows and watches as Newt stares openly at everything, taking in the truth of the world outside their apartment.

The wandering, the meandering finally stops as they reach a gash in the ship and take a shoddy gangplank across to a nest made out of a gutted room. Natural light filters through translucent tarps and shoddy flexglas shields. It’s much brighter here than it is in the giant sorting room. Colder too. Quieter. Tables are littered with interesting valuables, more sentimental to this keeper than anything else, if H has to hazard a guess. He seems the type to sell his own brother if it turns him a profit. And there, piled up like mock-skyscrapers to a metropolis of papers, are files and binders and books. The man goes to a huge ledger and carefully removes it, setting it atop a plateau of old receipts and travel brochures. He begins to flip it over and over, his clay-stained fingers leaving little bits flaked off to nestle into the book’s spine. He turns a page and skims his finger down it, again and again and stops.

A jagged piece lies down the center of the book like a scar. Four pages have been torn out completely.

The man makes short, whimpering sounds of confusion, flipping back and forth, like it is a bad mirage and the pages will suddenly appear if he flips it just right. If he tricks the book to behave for him.

“N…no. No, they were right…they were right here,” he says, holding the cover of the book up towards Officer H. “They were right here. I swear. I keep my records, you know. I keep…they had to be right here.”

Officer H steps closer and holds the book, looking at the last page before the missing pages. Looking at the one after it. He also touches the ripped edges, wondering what secrets were stolen.

“I swear,” the man is saying, clearly more agitated. Afraid Officer H will start to snoop and find out how “legal” all of this is. But Officer H feels tired. He’s so tired. He’s tired because he has disappointed Madam. He will disappoint her when he returns empty-handed. This trip meant nothing more than a crash, a bad pain in his leg, and missing logs. He closes his eyes and is about to say something when Newt clears his throat.

Officer H glances up at Newt, who is standing across the table. The man is still fretting beside him, but his words mean nothing. He means nothing. Newt puts his hand down and then lifts it again to show off a remarkable red shoe amongst all the items scattered there. Officer H steps around the rambling man and picks up the shoe, turning it over. The same worn-down flower print on the rubber sole. The same distinct smell. The match to the shoe he found in Kaidonovsky’s farm.

“Thank you,” Officer H says suddenly and the man shuts up, swallowing his words. “For your time. I’ll see myself out.”

H holds onto the shoe and walks with Newt back out the way they came. Perhaps not the answers they wanted. Perhaps not the answers they needed. But, at the very least, not empty-handed.


	12. Poetry, Politics, Lies, Lies, Lies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanessa and Jake get into the blade runner's apartment, but H and Newt come home early and have decided they need to do something about this whole missing replicant child business.

“I don’t get this.”

“Yes, you do.”

Vanessa taps the door, trying to listen through the rabble of everyone out in the hallway. There’s a heavy latch and then the reinforced bars locked on the inside. She leans on her shoulder, fluffy faux fur damaged by soot and snow, makeup streaked under one eye. Jake’s never seen her this…disheveled? That ain’t fair, of course, because she’s still banging. But.

“Why now, Nessa?”

Something pops near her hip where she’s jammed their little electro friend, tripping the security scan and letting them in. She grins, yanks him in, and kisses him briefly as they slip into the apartment. All for show. No way nobody ‘round here doesn’t recognize some Hangar skins. He doesn’t like that part either, fixing his neon plastic jacket over the mesh tank he took out of a donations box near Whitehall Goods. He’s been cold since day 1, but at least he looks stark plasti-clean in yellows and greens.

The apartment is dark and lifeless. Even the flexglass is frosted over and any holograms intervening on their affairs gets stuck as ghostly afterimages on the window pane. The air is dead. The electronics don’t flash on for them. The obvious arm up on the ceiling doesn’t extend and contract to project a companion AI to greet them.

It’s fucking weird.

Vanessa wastes no time on snooping, much as Jake wants to. She slides the door shut behind them and heads over to a small black control panel on the wall, jimmies the face off, and stares down at blinking green lights and a couple dozen wires.

“Ness—”

“Jake, love.” Nessa pries out one of the diodes, little metallic teeth nearly all uniform and straight before she crushes it in her hand. “Don’t think too hard on this.”

“No, I’m just saying.”

“He’s a blade runner.”

“Yeah?” Jake fiddles with an empty pocket, slides his hand further and nearly fetches his cellular to check the time. Look for messages. Spy on the pic he’s snagged with Nate near a huff lounge with garish pinks and blues uniting their faces pressed together in the dark. “That don’t exactly mean we gotta invade his house and break his stuff.”

“Jake,” Vanessa says firmly and spots the mirror relay over the IPP sensor. She sighs. It blows out of her like a breeze, easy and gentle as ever, right as she grips the whole apparatus and pulls hard. “Oh, you bastard.”

“What? What’d I do? I’m—”

“He’s already been compromised,” she says, holding up a bent piece of steel right before she snaps the antennae.

Poor Nessa. She looks pissed, tonguing the inside of her cheek as she closes the metal plate over the console. Titanic set of balls on this one. Tagging and tailing and taking from a blade runner. Rogue replicant, that’s what they are. Are there official lists? Has to be, right? This has to be a punishable offense, and replicants don’t get the slap on the wrist treatment.

And ain’t it always been this way? Ain’t this the world? Any point in trying to change it? Trying to save it?

Another flash of on the windows puts a spike of ice down Jake’s spine. He’s rigid as Vanessa. He wants to go over and help untangle the mess of pulled wires going all cat’s cradle around her fingers, kiss close the little cuts and bruises painting her knuckles and then take her out of here. Run. Call up Officer Tight Ass and tell him, fuck it, just do a fucking heist and take the first shuttle up to the stars. They still have those old shatterdomes with the shuttles up north. Wouldn’t be too hard to jury-rig a little one-way transport together. There’s no point to it. Out there is as bad as in here, even if it is dead quiet. There’s no safe place. There’s no soft, warm home. There’s rain and cold and dirt and death.

There is a click at the door.

No replicant has survived by hesitating. And in the very nature of their obedience, yes, they should have stood still and waited for the conclusion of their crimes like good little boys and girls should, but Jake rushes to Vanessa same as she goes to him, colliding near the embarrassingly tiny card table where the blade runner likely takes his meals. They grab elbows, swallow the sounds of pain from hitting reinforced bone to hyper-polymer stitch skin, forehead to forehead, fist to rib in the mad dash to get out of the living space before the door unlocks and Officer H hurries inside.

“Window,” Vanessa whispers, but Jake shakes his head and yanks her towards the closet. It would be too much noise from outside if they opened the window, surely, and they’d be caught before they dropped out onto the fire escape. If they’re lucky enough to have a fire escape. These shitty little roach motels have next to nothing on decent regulations.

The closet is tiny, and they cram themselves in like corpses, barely getting the door shut when they hear something in the living room.

“—ll then we run.”

“That is not an option, Newton.”

“Anything is an option, dude! You have a _choice_ , okay? You’re not just a fucking robot. You’re _not_ a fucking robot, period, because then I could actually touch—”

“Please.”

“It’s out there! They are out there. Right now. Probably miles and miles away and we can find them!”

“They were. We don’t know if they’re still alive. You have no evidence.”

“I don’t have…I have a feeling. Okay? I have a gut feeling. No, fuck you, don’t just walk away. Listen to me. I know—”

The bedroom door slams open with more force than probably intended. The blade runner’s head is down, his shoulders slumped and his limp more prominent. _He has a fucking limp?_ Jake wonders, holding his breath as they watch him move around his bedroom, pulling out something from a bedside nightstand. It looks red. Faded, yes, dark, yes, but the color shines through the grime all the same. He pulls something else out of his pocket and looks at the two. A match. Whatever it is, he sets it on the unmade bed, digging around again until he gets out an extra charge clip for his weapon.

“They _grew up there_ , man,” the companion AI says adamantly, rushing into the room after the blade runner. Looks like a NEwT system. Short, friendly face, but this one’s a bit more customized than they see on the adverts. Glasses, for a start. And looks like a button-down shirt with a tie, which isn’t exactly the wildest outfit in the world. And tattoos. Arms are loaded with them, actually. “Okay? Listen to me. They grew up. They _grew_. They weren’t made in a lab, plugged into a machine and printed out in a bio vac bag. They weren’t built. They had a _mother_. Hell, a father who might even be _out there_.”

“He was retired,” the blade runner says towards the bedding. Towards those two red…well, Jake thinks they might be shoes? Little kids’ shoes? He can’t be certain, and he doesn’t strain to see.

“Babe. Come _on_.”

“Don’t.”

“You know he was teasing, right? Hansen was just being c—”

Officer H sits too quickly, holding his knee as everything settles back down. He puts his elbows onto his thighs, staring at empty hands that are soon replaced with the NEwT system’s holographic hands. They sync so quickly. It’s almost impossible to tell that one of them isn’t even real. The blade runner carefully moves his thumb over the AI in a soothing circle. Practiced gestures, by the looks of it. He sighs, to himself. To the AI. To the room?

“I’m ruined for baseline,” H says with a sad little twist of his too-wide mouth.

“That’s why we’re running.” The NEwT kneels down, still pretending to hold Officer H’s hand. “Fuck ‘em. Let’s go find the kid instead.”

“They’ll come after me.”

“Us,” the AI corrects.

“Us, right. Of course, darling.” H considers something for a moment, slowly moving the AI’s hand to look at his fingers. “I’ll get my ring?”

“And break my home unit.”

Jake’s heart hammers for a second at that. They’ll know someone was in their apartment and—wait, rings? _Rings_? Holy shit, did this guy marry his, okay, no time—messed with their stuff and might still be in said apartment to be found and shot and retired and shit shit _shit_.

Vanessa must have the same thought. Her hand tightens around Jake’s wrist, an anchor point in the dark.

“Why?” Officer H is coming closer and the two stiffen, ready to leap out of the cramped closet and fight when the doors open. But he steps aside, over to a little dresser and pulls open a drawer. He shifts rolled socks and underwear and fingers something off the bottom of the drawer. A ring. The ring. It doesn’t glint in the low-level light, but the shape is so familiar in his hand. He looks on the inside at something too small to be seen from their limited vantage point before slipping the simple silver band around his left ring finger. He stares a moment more, clenches his fist, and turns out of the room to follow his AI.

“And why are we breaking things?” he asks, their voices barely muffled by the barrier of a wall and a half-closed door.

More sounds. Domestic sounds, hushed promises and curses, and then a chirp from a cell phone. Jake has a buzzy-high feeling that it’s his own cell, but he muted that and his stomach settles again as the blade runner finishes up in his living room, takes the AI, and leaves.

“He knows,” Vanessa says in the murky silence.

“He does?”

Vanessa runs her thumb over Jake’s wrist, same as that blade runner was doing to his AI, and pulls him out of the closet. They try the window, in the event the blade runner is still out in the hallway, and are blessed with a rickety fire escape. Down, down, down in the dark streets, the deluge of people and replicants. He follows because he doesn’t think he has a choice. Because that blade runner might “know,” but he doesn’t. And it hurts, really, but so does everything else, right? That’s life. That’s—

\---

“—so stupid.”

“Maybe she can help us,” H says, touching the head of his cane instead of Newt’s offered hand. The hovercar sits, all scratches and damage to the undercarriage hidden as he parks in the nearly empty garage atop the precinct. Everyone prefers the underground to stay out of the elements, of course. “At the very least, give us time before someone decides to add us to the hit list.”

“I don’t know….”

“I want to trust her,” H says.

 He pauses, holding the emanator without muting Newt. The thing feels far more sacred than it did before. It’s Newt’s only lifeline now, after his home console was tampered with. By whom, H doesn’t even hazard a guess, but they officially downloaded everything they had into that emanator and deleted every last trace of Newt from their home. H, too, if he’s honest. He doesn’t think he’ll ever go back. He wishes, briefly, they had decided to pack some clothes, but those are such trivial things in the face of what’s to come.

“Darling.” H nearly reaches for him, but instead plays with the silver band on his finger. “Trust me?”

Newt casts his eyes down, his thick black frames sliding perfectly down the slope of his nose, and he pushes them back up without thinking.

“Newt?”

“Yes,” Newt finally says, twitching his hands up towards his chest in agitation. Or worry. Or anxiety. His perfectly imperfect companion. “Yes, fine, yes. I trust you.” He puts on a smile and H knows he’s trying, really, but can see some sad, lonely thing slip behind his eyes. It hurts. He wants to kiss them close and make him feel better, but he just stands there, waiting for Newt to fold up into his emanator before he heads in. “I’m coming up with a better name for you.”

“What?”

“Yeah, fuck it. We’re going rogue, right? Rogue replicants can name themselves. Or I’m going to do it. You’re too important to just be a letter.”

H finds some small bit of laughter tucked away in his chest as he glances away. “Alright,” he says through a chuckle. “I’d like that.”

Newt puts both hands on H’s cheeks, focusing his attention back to his face. “More human than human, y’know?” Newt ghosts his lips across H’s before he disappears, and H stands there a moment, fighting down the blush that threatens to break out. He was right. He is ruined for baseline. And suppose that is just fine, if he can get to Madam’s office afterwards and explain himself. He sets the emanator in a different pocket, the slim breast pocket just over his heart, and grabs his cane up again. He pats his side where the shoes and the little wooden jaeger toy sit, waiting for him.

\---

“Officer H-G -one-six-five-five-four.”

_Breathe. Breathe evenly. Breathe succinctly. Breathe._

“Long time. You missed your last two. Ready?”

Officer H stares at the strip, breathing, breathing, breathing. He fists the strip of cloth over his kneecap. Breathing. He smooths his hand out and notices the slight tug of sweaty skin. Breathing. His heartrate at an elevated 75. Breathing.

“Yes, sir,” he answers.

“Go ahead and recite your baseline for me.”

The perfectly calm demeanor doesn’t find him. That switch doesn’t flip as Officer H scrambles to recite into his baseline. His voice takes on an empty tone, yes, empties himself, yes, the words that have been with him since the start, from his inception, yes. Breathing. Yes. He is distracted and impure and too full within those words. Emptiness is the goal, but emptiness is a terrible comfort, if he is honest with himself. And he almost always is.

“Binary abstractions within binary finites. An equation of one is equal to the…is the equation of many. Numbers do not lie. Politics, poetry, promises, these are lies. Numbers are our closest lies. Numbers are the closest—”

“Numbers,” the man says, triggered by the unusual inconsistencies within Officer H’s baseline. He knew he got it wrong. He felt it tripping over his tongue. The Voight-Kampff scans micro movements in Officer H’s eye, across his face, spitting readouts of his emotional response. Baseline is to test that there _is_ no emotional response. That he is steady. H is _not_ steady.

“Numbers,” Officer H repeats, belated by his internal struggle. He sees Newt’s face flickering outside the hovercar, static imagery from the EMP blast that nearly killed him. He sees the shoe tucked away in the piano. He smells old wood.

“Numbers. How many people are there left on Earth?” asks the other man, so familiar. So familiar, he thinks he sees his face, then. He thinks he has stood next to this man, with his bow tie, with his coifed hair, with his rosary beads. The tempo starts to pick up and the white light overhead that is usually bright but steady begins to blink.

“Numbers.”

“How long did old Nexus models live with their limited lifespans? Numbers.”

“Numbers.”

“What’s your badge number, officer?”

H clenches his fist again, staring at the spot, imagining the eye to be Newt’s eye, his pupil lost in gold and green and gray. It should be soothing, he thinks, to imagine it. He rubs the ring still on his left hand, turning it over and over and over. He blinks, which he never does during his baseline assessment, as he remembers he’s supposed to repeat. “Numbers.”

“Did they promise to elevate you beyond your status?”

“Numb….” H blinks, his face heating up around the edge of his jaw. “Promises.”

“How hard it is it to keep a promise?”

It’s not hard. It’s very easy, he thinks. It’s ingrained in his DNA. Obedient man, isn’t he? Aren’t they? He makes promises to Newt and he obeys. That’s his—

“Promises.”

“Have you ever broken a promise?”

_Yes. I’m so sorry._

“Promises.”

“Have you learned to lie better?” H swallows, such a tiny gesture, really. Too telling. “Promises.”

“Promises.”

“Would you lie to save a loved one? Promises.”

“Promises.”

“Would you lie to save yourself?”

“Promises.”

“Lies,” the man says and H blinks again, the lights overhead flashing so quickly, he thinks they might start to create incorrect patterns in his brain, that it might overload, and he’ll slip back into nothing. He can’t do that. He has to see the Lieutenant first. He has to get out of here, with Newt. Because he promised.

“Lies,” H answers quietly.

“Promises,” the man says louder and H repeats back, with the same vigor, “Promises.”

“Promises.”

“Promises.”

The room darkens in a flash, a low red light he never noticed before highlighting a strip across the ceiling. There is a pause, stifling and wonderful as H blinks too many times. He listens intently for the door to unlock behind him, for the machine to turn off; the Voight-Kampff scanner has a distinct click and whir right before it shuts down and he does not hear it right away. But then, yes. There. Like a whirligig making its final rotation and locked in against a magnet at the end. A shutter sound locks into place.

“Jesus, H,” the man says, and H lowers his eyes to the floor. “Report to Madam.”

H bends over slowly to retrieve his coat from the floor. He stabs his cane down by his leg and keeps his head bowed as he slowly turns towards the door. “Thank you, sir.”


	13. There is Time for Breathing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All done with baseline, Officer H must confront Lieutenant Mako before he can make a run for it with Newt. And Newt has given him a name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, only been like a month, welcome back! There is blood and gore and violence in this chapter, as a heads up. And major (cannon compliant, blech) character death.

“Lock the door.”

H hesitates and Lieutenant Mako pushes up from her desk, moving around to come to him. She looks more agitated than he has ever seen her, brusquely shoving past to press the handscan that locks her office door. A pulse goes through it, turning the flexglass opaque to give them more privacy. It matches the set of windows behind her desk. There is a symmetry in her office that is very pleasing, very relaxing, despite the unfavorable mood that currently permeates it. She moves again, her head bowed, her hand twitching near her hip. She sighs so heavily.

“Madam, I—”

“Do you understand what is at stake here?” Mako sits firmly, her hands flat on her desk. There is a dark gray file there and H wonders if those are his numbers, printed in the corner. “This? Breaks the world, H.”

“Madam….”

“No.” She looks at him and he can see the weary rage settling on her shoulders. “Nobody understands. It’s over. Chuck’s dead. We still can’t find who stole the remains. It’s out there. They find that child, it’s—”

“Taken care of,” H says and he finds, in the moment, for his Madam, the lie comes so easily. It feels perfectly natural. A protection and a kindness to this woman who is leader and his world. Or was. It hurts much less than he anticipated. When she slowly settles back into her chair, her face smoothing out in increments, he understands he said the right thing. He almost smiles.

He does not.

“It’s gone,” she says. Not a question, perhaps, but in need of confirmation.

“Yes.” A Voight-Kampff would not have read anything wrong in that moment. “Hiding in the orphanage until he came of age. Took a sanitation job over in San Largo, working at the Juthain launch site. We got him before he could slip away.”

Another steady, grateful breath. Lieutenant Mori tucks one of the blue strands back behind her ear, a curiously innocent gesture that, as always, fascinates Officer H. He wishes. He wishes….

“You’re off baseline,” she says, her voice frank and stern but her face. Her soft face. Her face still holds some of the relief garnered from his lie. “Way off.”

“I understand,” H says.

She looks at the door again, a micromovement of speculation, and she decides, too, that she is going to lie. For him. “You know where I’m supposed to report you.”

“Yes, Madam.”

“I can give you time to get out of the station. Go home. Get your head on straight.” Her hands, these steady, tiny, slim things, splay out on the desk again and she leans forward with such authority, H finds himself straightening his spine without thought or question. The few scant bric-a-brac of ornaments—a glass vase with blue marbles, a metal stand with an honorary from the state for her work, a simplistic statue of a jaeger—fade as he looks into her eyes. “H…you’re too good to let this get to you. Please.”

In that moment, H wishes. He wishes he could tell her that he loves her. That, beyond her being there for his initial Enlightenment, of waking up and starting his life, he loves her because she is, in her way, so very kind to him. And he thinks that love is the love of family. Of connection. Of hope, even. To be granted even a few minutes to escape instead of being sent to Reassignment and likely retired, she is giving him this chance. He tucks a fist behind his back and squeezes his hand into a tight fist, his skin going white.

He does not tell her he loves her.

Instead, he bows his head a little and says, “Thank you, Madam.”

And he leaves.

\---

“I can’t believe she let you keep the car.”

“A bit of luck, I suppose,” H responds, padding around under the heavy console until he finds the wire he’s looking for and yanks it loose. Another transmitter to the precinct. It’s hardly the only one and not a perfect solution. There are certainly other ways to track them, but it helps. He immediately turns away the dirty plastic screen where he would usually see Lieutenant Mori speak to him on his missions and puts his hand over the rust-stained eye scan near his elbow. “There’s someone we need to see in the city and then we’re off.”

“Where’re we going?”

“That’s why we need to see him, darling.”

H flips his hand and Newt immediately touches it. The ring vibrates ever so slightly. It has a very basic ID chip installed and it is almost worthless, holds no charge or data save the serial number and date of birth—Enlightenment, in this case—of the man who wears it. Newt could not hide in it the same as he does his emanator, his heart and body now, as it were, but the ring is perfect for the fact that, when Officer H wears it, Newt can feel him. He can feel the ring and it is almost real to hold his hand. He never asks H to wear it when he’s working, because that seems inappropriate, the idle hopes of an AI program, but now he hopes he’ll never take it off.

\---

It is so obscenely quiet for the late, violent hours of the city. The snow has just started again and most have gone home as shifts change over. She is lucky that Lieutenant Mori is so committed to her work. Something admirable about that, truly. Something to aspire to, in a way, but Alice already knows she is perfect. She is _obedient. Perfect. Loved._

_I am Love._

The door is not locked as she enters, unmolested by anyone asking why she might want to visit the lieutenant at a late hour in the precinct. Alice is wearing immaculate white, her dress clean, perfect lines with clean, perfect earrings, not a hair out of place. She has a bag with her, and gloves, and the comforting knowledge that the recording devices around the office have all been shut off for the next twenty minutes.

Whatever Mako is in the middle of, she glances up from her desk and registers Alice for exactly what she is and who she must work for. The status radiates from Alice with the help of the suit, yes, and with the titanium rod of a spine she seems to have. The slightly dead, unfeeling eye of a perfect, perfect, _perfect_ replicant.

“Can I help you with something?” Mako asks. She has a quiet voice. It is soft and kind, even as she laces hard-knuckled fingers across her lap.

Alice smiles, as is socially acceptable, and because she feels no threat from this small, insignificant woman.

“You have…a good boy,” Alice says, looking around the office. Mako has dressed the place with a sturdy, sleek leather couch, a bookshelf with nameless, plain spines. Her desk. Her faux plant in the corner. Her modest artwork. The dark, sleek aesthetic of someone who is proud of order and quiet, given the opaque glass window behind her. There is a black circle that covers one of the walls. Alice smiles at it. “He’s been very busy, Madam. Slipped his leash, don’t you think?” Alice turns her full attention to Mako again. “Tell me. Where might a good boy go?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mako answers and touches a kill switch to her desktop, the screens going dark around her, like shades drawn. She sits back again and puts her palms flat on the armrest of her desk chair.

It is so.

Very.

Telling.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Alice answers. She adjusts the fingers to one of her gloves as a distraction. “We’ve been monitoring him, same as you, and we know he’s after—”

“The child?” Mako supplements. Oh so helpful. She stands, her fingertips gliding over the surface of her desk. “Yes, I know. Already taken care of. He confirmed the kill this afternoon.”

“You stupid, insolent—”

“It is what it is,” Mako says. She plants her feet just so and Alice steps closer, enjoying a good four inches on the woman.

“You’re all so ignorant. When faced with the fantastic new, your only goal is to destroy it.”

“You have what you need.” Mako’s eyes narrow in on her, needlessly touching one of those electric-blue strands of hair at the side of her head. “Killed one of my men for it. Do us all a favor and go back to Gottlieb with your—”

With perfect, perfect, _perfect_ replicant speed, Alice reaches out and clutches Mako’s hand, the wet snap of bones muffled in her grip. She enjoys this look on the smaller woman. Pain, yes, defeat, of course, but determined anger setting her jaw as she refuses to cry out. And, oh, how Alice would like to make her do so. It gives it the edge of sport to this whole song and dance that so few can manage.

“And you honestly believed him,” Alice whispers, close enough she can see her breath shift some of the hair on Mako’s cheek. “Why?” She squeezes harder, splitting skin and meat, their hands lubricated by Mako’s blood. “Because we’re all _so_ obedient? Because he said so? Because we never _lie_?”

Another crunch. Mako almost crumples from it, her breath shaky and strained. Alice, for what it is worth, enjoys this part of it most of all.

“I’m going to tell them you attacked me. And I just _had_ to protect myself.”

Something shifts. Not the fingers, no. The hand, no. Those are broken beyond repair, and soon the rest will follow, Alice thinks, but she can feel a slight jolt down her brachioradialis and she looks up as Mako’s mouth splits into a furious snarl, rolls her shoulder back, and slams her free fist into Alice’s jaw. Mako cries out with the impact, more from her training than from the obvious pain of trying to hit a replicant without gloves.

It does not do nearly enough. It _hurts_ , because what sick creature invents a fake human, a superior product, and decides to grant it the gift of _feeling_ only to have the world and the pathetic humans who inhabit it hurt and hurt and hurt them again and again, for amusement or pleasure of their simple ability to exist poorly. Alice reaches to rub her jaw, letting Mako’s useless pulp of a hand drop, and smears two simple lines across her skin. She tongues the spot where she thinks one of her teeth feels loose.

There is time for breathing.

A breath.

Alice takes a breath and rolls as Mako swings her booted foot up high, connecting in nearly the same spot as her fist, her blood like a target on Alice’s face. Alice does not bend, and wonders if a few toes were shattered for that exchange. She elbows away one of Mako’s knees, then her fist again, stepping back. Her heel makes a neat little click on the floor. She earns another kick to her jaw and finally snaps her attention to the large black circle on the wall. Acrylic. Stone. It does not matter. It’s like looking in a void.

She breathes.

She stares into nothing and waits for the inconvenient pains to stop.

The sound of ragged breathing draws her attention back as Mako tries to make a sprint for the door. She fumbles with her pocket, drawing out her phone, and immediately thumbs up an icon. Alice turns, curious how far this woman can run, can limp with that foot like that and her hand likely a lightning rod of pain.

“Mako?” someone asks on the other line, tired. They all sound so small and tired. Only Gottlieb has the rich timber of anyone who _matters_.

Alice peeks around and fetches a sleek little statue in the abstract shape of a jaeger sitting on the desk. A novel item, surely. She tests the weight of it, bouncing it twice in her palm.

“I love you. I lo—”

_I am love. Loved._

It is obscenely quiet for the late, violent hours of the city. Alice pulls Mako back into the office like one would carry a doll. Certainly not a favored doll, just a toy that gets lost in the closet and has dust on its clothes. She uses the handle of the statue imbedded in Mako’s spine, brings her face up to the monitor to register it, and drops her with the same unceremonious detachment. The screen glows a beautiful, welcoming blue, light ripples like an alien ocean over her face and she searches for the file on Officer H-G-one-six-five-five-four.

\---

 _God_ , it’s loud. And Newt likes loud. Loud, yeah. Yes. Hell yes. Loud means people and sometimes even H’s soft breathing while he’s asleep on the couch is loud and he loves that too.

It’s the lights that always sort’ve piss him off.

They scatter his projection algorithm and it’s just…a thing. It’s annoying. It’s nothing to be done about it, because it just who he is, but sometimes he likes being annoyed too. Because H helped program him to be annoyed and, yes, absolutely there are issues with that, but, honestly? It makes him feel special.

It makes him feel special now, too, that he’s standing next to H in the small interior of a shop he’s never heard of before, listening to H haggle with an info-broker over the semantics of payment after he hands over the wooden statue of the jaeger.

“No, I don’t want sheep, real of otherwise.”

The man is so thin. His eyes stick out too far and his teeth push out from pale, receded gums, stained black at the roots where he keeps rubbing a gritty, inky substance from a small aluminum plate on his desk. He talks with his hands, a slang from hagglers who find the world is actually, honestly loud and sometimes nobody can hear each other at the market stalls. H knows this language. Newt doesn’t, but he’s okay watching H and the man do a back and forth, one so animated and one so stoic. Newt could reach out right then and touch his hand.

But he doesn’t.

“What do you mean, one of the shatterdomes?” The man continues and H nods, leaning closer to see the old analog screen flickering gray and green lines by the man’s wrist. “That one’s…no. That one’s been decommissioned for years. It’s empty.”

“Hey,” Newt says, pointing at a dish with red instead of black. “What’s this smell like?”

H glances back at him, the man turning black eyes on Newt and a small, friendly smile on his face as he mutters something low to H.

“Uh, curry,” H says and wrinkles his nose at the man. “Hardly worth your time. I need you to be certain that’s where this was.”

“Iyam, Iyam,” the man repeats bluntly, holding up the jaeger carving again. He asks something and H snatches it back, putting it in his pocket. He hands over a few bills instead. “No. Thank you. Newt, darling?” H stabs his cane purposefully against the floor, clearly agitated. “Let’s go.”

“Okay.” He stops poking uselessly at the spices and waves once at the man as they turn to leave. “Listen, he can try and put me in one of those sim battles, but it wouldn’t even be fair.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t understand what he was saying.”

“Mm.” Newt shrugs and laughs hard as they spill back out into the crowded street, the sleet of a midnight storm slicing clean through him. “I just said he talked really really fast and I couldn’t keep up. But…I also lied.”

“Don’t do that.”

“You love me,” Newt says with a little glean in his eye and is rewarded with H’s hand extended to “touch” his own. “I’m gonna call you Hermann, by the way.”

“ _Hermann_?” H sounds indignant, but the corner of his mouth twists up just so. “Why in the world would you pick that name?”

“Suits you.”

“Yes, but _why_?”

“Well, H. Hank sounds too plain. Harvey sounds too…lawyer.”

“What?”

“I dunno. And Happy sounds really hippy, which you are not.”

“Hippy?”

“Yeah, dude.”

“What’s…what’s hippy?”

“Jesus, Herms, we live in California.”

“Herms?”

“Hermann!”

“I don’t think you had to limit yourself to my letter.”

“You’re no fun.”

They walk back towards the car, ignorant of anyone who could possibly be following them, or planning on following them. Just with each other. Enjoying the simple fact that soon this city will be behind them and there is a world out there that needs to be explored. With H. With _Hermann._

H opens Newt’s door for him, even if he doesn’t need to, and Newt thinks, and then says, “I wish I could kiss you again.”

“When this is over,” H starts to say—or, rather, _Hermann_ starts to say— “we’ll just have to see what we can do about that.”

As H. As Hermann settles into his seat, Newt looks over at him and smiles. _I’ll get better that._ He reaches out again and asks, “Promise?”

Hermann hesitates, just a moment, not the idea troubling him, more the word itself. He takes Newt’s hand all the same and answers, “If you like. Yes. I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, I was so mad I killed Mako. It's the future. I'll probably fix that later. They've got *technology* and *medicine.* We can hold out on that!


	14. No Time to Wonder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermann and Newt arrive at the old Shatterdome, only to have a run-in with the man they thought was retired.
> 
> Pentecost is there to defend his home.

They head north. Up the coast. It’s dark and the rain-turned-snow starts to become thick and heavy for a time and then? Nothing. A smattering of sleet that is brushed away by the velocity of the vehicle, taking them further from civilization.

Perhaps even further north there are still those stubborn pines, but they’ve only come across the graves of nature, the desert creeping up to the edge of the farms and the overlapping housing compounds and the “suburbs.” Not the suburbs of the twenty-aughts, just…homes. Boxes. No yards. Paved streets. Empty-looking farms like the Kaidonovsky’s under plastic sheeting and armored domes.

The weathered gray landscape becomes monotonous within minutes, bleeding into the gray overhead that’s been illuminated by floodlights all along the coast. Light pollution so thick, even the sky is stuck in an ugly twilight. Hermann closes his eyes as they escape the fringes of Los Angeles, as they traverse the windmill-heavy hills of San Francisco, skirting border patrols under the guise of a police-issued vehicle.

It really is a miracle that Mako let them keep the car.

While they slip further away from their previous life, their safety and their world, Hermann lets the steady churn carry him into a deep sleep. Newt watches him from the passenger seat, curled up tight, with his knees to his chest and his arms secured around them. His glasses could slide down the bridge of his nose, so he lets them, and pushes them back into place afterwards. Animated gestures that barely take up any of his processing. He stares at the rise and fall of Hermann’s chest, the wet curl of his hair swooping playfully across his forehead in comical little waves.

They’d been caught in the rain for a moment or two when they had left the precinct and, as he dried off in the hovercar, his clothes a little mustier, his shirt a little more wrinkled, his hair lifted and swooped and swirled with untamed cowlicks.

Newt imagines reaching out and brushing his fingers through them. He thinks of Hermann trying to tame his hair and holding his hand as he does so.

Newt imagines pressing against his bruised cheek, tracing the gentle frown of his lips, the tiny wiry hairs of his eyebrows, the unfortunate patch beginning to grow around the bottom of his chin.

Hermann shifts in his sleep, his shoulder rising to his cheek and back down, and it startles the illusion that he’s perfectly still. Almost dead. Newt quickly looks out the window instead of risk being caught and notes the burning red along the horizon. Sunrise.

By the time they land, the whole desert is that burning color. Napalm orange. The soil is stained to look like blood and the air is thick with dust. Hermann has landed at an abandoned lot. There’s the distant sound of waves crashing, the air too thick to see the coastline. A man might need one of those military grade gas-masks out here, but Hermann simply buttons the top of his coat around his nose, finds his sunglasses in the glove compartment, and slings a set of long-range heat-sensing Viz-Eye binoculars around his neck.

“Perimeter, one-hundred meters,” he calls out to the vehicle. The police drone detaches and heads off as Newt appears next to Hermann.

“Toxicity levels are through the roof,” he says, hovering over Hermann’s arm.

Newt glances up at the drone and knows how easy it would be to bounce a signal off it. Rise above the clouds overhead and zip off to the space station near the Breach. It’s not that he _has_ to visit it every day. And, technically speaking, he should have no impulses to control, other than the ones Hermann helped him program for a more “authentic” experience. It’s just…he’s curious. And he doesn’t know how long they’ll be here….

 Hermann motions to pat Newt’s arm before he catches himself, turning his palm up. The ring on his finger looks as dusty as the everything else in the thick red fog. Still inviting. Newt touches, feels the pull, the electric zap that grounds him, while Hermann’s other hand shifts over the head of his cane. “Even for a replicant, we’ve got, what, twenty minutes?”

“I’ll be fine,” Hermann answers. His voice is muffled by the protective wrap of his coat.

“I’m just saying.”

“I know.”

The silence of the place is so loud, it hurts. The air is red and thick and stings Hermann’s eyes, but he presses forward all the same towards that giant structure. The very one that used to manufacture the jaegers that were went up to the stars to fight their battles against the ominous kaiju invasion.

There is a dock spreading out from the back of the structure. The ocean is still not visible. Perhaps it is that black line on the edge. Roads lead up that have rusted barricades, convenient holes cut into the fences while cement blockades crumble onto their rebar skeletons. Hermann barely has to do anything to traverse it. Newt has a bit more fun, pretending to vault over the rubble, pushing his hand through a pile of broken stones in the hopes of disturbing some cockroach infestation. Something that could have survived the bombs that attempted to destroy the world.

The closer they get to the old Shatterdome, the more cognizant Hermann is of his footsteps. He knows nobody lives here. Nobody survives here. But he spots a square structure built up from an old land vehicle, an obelisk of retired technology. The buzzing silence takes on a new form as Hermann presses his hand into the dark slot near the top. When he removes it…insects. His hand is covered in insects. Vibrating, dancing, generating a heat as they work together to survive.

Bees.

Hermann wipes them away and turns to Newt. He motions to be quiet, discreetly muting his output on the emanator. Newt waves his hands and makes a face, but he’s completely silent now. Entirely unfair, but they can’t risk someone catching them now, when they’re so close.

Bees.

Who –

Who keeps bees? Now? Here? In the red desert?

They’re too close to the ground and too far away from the drone. Hermann removes his sunglasses anyways and pressed the binoculars to his face, flipping a toggle for heat-signatures. The artificial beehive lights up in magma colors before his screen is overcome with a red warning light.

_FUCK YOU HERM_

Hermann pulls his face away to stare at Newt. He’s pouting, flipping Hermann off. Hermann barely sighs, feeling that tight warm patch in his heart that loves every silly thing Newt does for attention. Even now. Even in the face of the unknown.

There’s nothing else around them to see and Hermann’s chest is starting to constrict. He swallows every cough, pushes through every labored breath, and unholsters his gun before he forces open an access door. Not the giant gates through which the Jaegers walked, but a reinforced metal hatch to the side, perhaps somewhere that one of the techs escaped for a smoke break so long ago.

There’s still that filter of dust inside, until they take a hallway and begin to traverse deeper. It’s well-reinforced. Truly, these old tunnels were meant to survive so much more than a bomb. Hermann finally removes the wrap around his face, unclipping it and letting it frame his jaw. True, it obscures his peripherals and his head is beginning to hurt with the unfiltered strain of nothing. Of no sound. He thumbs Newt’s emanator up a hair and breathes easier when he hears the familiar rubber soles on the grated floor.

“Don’t you _dare_ mute me again, you sonuvabitch,” Newt says close to his ear, his voice a strained whisper. “You think I can’t be quiet? I can be quiet. I know how to be quiet, okay? Hey. Are you listening to me? Herms, I fucking—"

Hermann pivoted and cupped Newt’s face with his left hand. The ring vibrated ever so slightly. Hermann wonders why he never bothered to notice, and his eyes drift over to the faint white mark on Newt’s cheek.

“Newton, darling,” Hermann whispers. “I’m sorry. I—”

What a strange thing, to push a hologram out of the way. Hermann’s hand shoves through thin air, disrupting Newt’s program and nearly earning himself a bullet to the crook of his elbow as he wheels back against the metal wall. He fires twice down the hall. The man is just as quick, with a better understanding of the terrain, and avoids Hermann’s return fire.

He’s never been one to run when he can help it. Yes, when required, Officer H would sprint after the replicants he needed to retire, with a slightly longer shower and a painful night on the couch to follow. No showers, no couch to return to. No life, either, if he doesn’t turn and sprint down the hall now. Newt flashes in the hallway in front of the assailant while Hermann runs.

“Hey, man, we’re not here to—”

The man brushes through him without hesitation. Newt recollected in a blink, holding his hands up.

“Uh, okay. Rude?” And then, a beat longer, staring at the broad back of the man who is hunting his husband, Newt swallows uselessly. “Fuck, H, we’re – _fuck_! Hermann!” He jumps along the current, zipping back into Hermann’s pocket in an instant.  

Hermann never studied the old Shatterdome designs. There was no point, as he was not assigned to the Jaeger program—as much as he might have dreamed it, alone, in the secret hopes he carried. He blindly rushes the corner, hoping there’s more hallway to run, stabbing his cane into the metal floor to pivot. A gangplank opens to a huge hangar and Hermann pauses to stare up at it as the man runs up behind him. Another blast from the gun, the sound a heavy punch in the hallow room. Hermann spins, clutching his shoulder, and goes over the decaying banister.

His body hits concrete like a crate of stones.

Something….

No, many things crack. The floor. A bone somewhere. His cane. Something in his pocket?

There’s no time to wonder.

\---

Even after all these years, the training is drilled into him. Pentecost keeps his pistol out as he leans over the precarious railing. He aims at the dent in the floor, a spot of blood like a rose petal there in the center. _Replicant_ , he thinks. The gun, the posture, the unwavering light in his eye, the hunting means Blade Runner. Back in his day, it was man who hunted the replicants, wasn’t it?

Real men. Real Blade Runners.

This is a real Blade Runner too. Pentecost knows, and heads for the stairs back in the hallway. There’s no surviving if he lets another Blade Runner continue after him.

The old Shatterdome has plenty of places to hide. Lined with bunks to house the jaeger pilots, technicians, engineers, general labor force and the likes. There’s a huge caf with empty tables and the one more hangar for the rockets on the sound side. Worse yet if the Blade Runner gets downstairs where they keep the lab. It was easier to bioengineer the pilots here, on the base. Some might call it a graveyard with all those old bodies. Some might call it a waste of resources. Pentecost has called it a grocery store on three occasions now and he’s sick to even remember it, but a man has got to survive.

Why?

Long time to consider such a thing. Longer yet to let the notion lie down in the dirt and the body keeps going. Keep going. Keep—

Left.

There’re tracks in the dust. An uneven line that could just as well be Dog, but Dog has an even gait, doesn’t he? Dog sticks by his side when he goes out after the rain has pressed the dust back into the soil, giving him a longer window to check on the tenacious beehive he’s managed to rebuild several times and the garden he’s kept with all the tenacity of a lunatic under plasti domes in the carpark. They must look like giant bubble wrap to the drones above, when the drones even make it that far. Been a while since he’s had to hide from a hunter, another lunatic out in the wasteland. A Blade Runner.

Pentecost sweeps the bunks beside him. He swipes his foot in an ‘x’ in front of the doors before he makes his way left.

_Oh, sod it. He’s gone to the simulator._

There was a time when they were pulling proper data on the Breach and the kaiju who came through. They used to compile potentials on the new monsters that would replace the old while amassing calculations on the technology that kept the Breach open. And while the kaiju became bigger, better, stronger, they needed to keep up with the demand. The old Jaeger Corp, the first to create the replicants as soldiers, built a giant holographic simulator to practice drills, scrap obsolete replicants, and rebuild from that data.

Pentecost has a different use for the simulator.

Turns out, a giant hologram projector makes a fairly decent immersive theater and ripping old movies off the faulty feeds around the city kept him busy, when he felt himself too idle, too soft, too lonely. Dog’s not a great conversationalist. Neither’s Pentecost these days, if he’s honest.

His Blade Runner intruder must’ve seen the slapdash rig over the projection unit. There’s a faint blue light pulsing on the feed input, the smell of ozone, before the dusky intro swells to an old Tarsem Singh film. Bright flashes of color that promise clear skies and a warm sun flicker around them, settling into the uneven steel panels.

Pentecost hasn’t had time to restore the footage yet. It’s out of sync with the soundtrack, which crackles in occasionally, a loud jump of sound and then nothing.

The hologram paints him in warm false light, obscured in half-naked soldiers. He wishes he was still watching that Gene Kelly film. It’d be easier to see in the rain.

Another flicker and shout of music that dies just as suddenly, swallowed up. Pentecost hears a struggled breath and turns in time to catch a piece of hard wood to his wrist, knocking his pistol away. The cane snaps completely, clattering useless to the floor.

His wrist is broken.

Has to be.

Pentecost yanks his hand into his chest and rolls, jabbing twice into a thigh tough as a brick. The replicant buckles all the same, betraying a short grunt of pain before he’s swinging for Pentecost’s face. He’s still not sure if he winged the bastard, so he elbows hard into his chest, swipes up, and knocks his fist into the man’s jaw.

 _Christ_ , but it hurts.

It hurts.

He can worry about it later, when this one’s dead in the basement with the others. But—

\---

—It hurts.

Hermann grunts again, his head snapping back as the man lands another blow to his cheek. He ignores his leg, a pain screaming into his spine, something wet across his ribcage. He sees a giant in front of him, a shock of white hair and a black beard, brown canvas clothes, and he remembers the smell of garlic before the memory is punched away and replaced with the present.

Kaidonovsky did not kill him.

This man will not kill him either.

Some foreign ocean, crisp and blue and painful to look at, floods the arena. He doesn’t understand the images, nor does he want to take the time to interpret them. He understands, of course, it’s some old film, probably from ’06. It was Newt who saw the contraption and leapt away from him to slap it, the tattoos on his arms igniting white before he seemed to pop like a bubble.

Hermann would have shouted.

He would have caved on the spot, if Newt were gone. He knows this.

But his ring buzzed again as Newt reformed in the tumultuous display of colors, of disjointed sounds, a bit scrambled in the pixelated hologram movie.

He is alive. That is the only thing Hermann needs to survive this. No time to wonder how, of course, just that he will. He must.

The man has him in a hold, locked at an odd angle, beating his side where he landed from the fall. Hermann coughs twice, something sloppy and wet, before he grabs the man around his middle and hoists him up, slamming him onto the uneven surface of this strange projection chamber.

Hermann grits his teeth and holds the man’s neck, watching a thin stream of blood spill from his nostril. By now, it’s programming. It’s what he was meant to do. Retire. _Retire_.

But there’s a heavy pulse under his thumb and the man gasps, knocking Hermann’s elbow feebly. There’re old scars on his hands, lines that slip up underneath the cuff of his shirt. Dirt stains and sweat stains. He can’t imagine how this man survived out here. What he’s done just to be.

Hermann reaches into his pocket and pulls out the little toy. He has to clear his throat twice to find his voice.

“Do you know what this is?” He coughs against his sleeve and tries again. “Are you Stacker Pentecost?”

The man stares at it, going quiet under Hermann’s hand. He slowly releases him, still holding out the crude wooden stature, and earns a fist to the side of his head that makes him see stars. Then the world tilts and he’s on his back, pressed down to the floor, a knee on his guts and his wrist trapped until he releases the toy.

“We could go at this all night,” the man says, his voice deep and dusty as the place around them. It breaks through the static pop of the broken movie still playing over their bodies.

Hermann desperately swipes his thumb over the hand on his neck now, swallowing against the calloused grip and then is suddenly released.

“Come on.” Stacker is thumbing away his nosebleed, staring at his hand a moment before he reaches into his pocket to retrieve something. Hermann stiffens, expecting another pistol, only to see a small metal case with a few pills rattling inside. Pentecost pops one into his mouth and swallows before he motions to Hermann again. “Come on. You drink?”


	15. Let Them Come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake has to leave and is trying really hard to tell Nate. Well, not that hard. Less than that.
> 
> Hermann and Newt have a chance to talk to Stacker about his child. What's up with that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do indeed make a simple crass joke about blowjobs and the title of this chapter. I love it.

They have maybe hours at most. Everybody has limited time, but the now is palpable in a way that makes a man sweat. It is gravel churning in the guts. It is sharp and unpleasant and constricting. It’s pain. Time is measured in the discomfort.

Jake puts his hand in the doorway, grips the jamb, and doesn’t even look to see his fingerprints smooshed into the metal. It’s blatant he’s throwing a fit at this point, but it’s the only way he’s able to get Nate’s attention.

“Jake….”

“No. _No._ You’re gonna listen to _me_ for a change, alright?”

“You can’t get a deposit back on that,” Nate says, avoiding the obvious and going for the stupidly regulated for the sake of protecting something inside him. Something that cares. Jake hopes it’s something that cares.

So, Jake strains to crush the door further, the tough skin of his palms still threatening to break. Just cause he bleeds…. Just cause his bones can shatter…. Just cause his lungs could give out or his heart could technically stop…could technically break…and would it? Can it? Just cause he’s a replicant, does that really mean he ain’t even real? He’s alive? That his feelings are any less?

They’re _better_ than human, innit that right?

Except, yeah, maybe, but he likes this one a lot. And he doesn’t wanna be better or worse than Nate, he just wants to be equal. Hell, he just wants to be heard.

Time’s ticking and his hand hurts enough that he gasps, pulls back, and closes his fist a few times to make sure all the digits are still in working order.

Nate steps closer and carefully takes his hand, smoothing his own rough fingers over the badly bruised skin.

“You’re an idiot,” Nate says softly. The words are dusting, little sprinkles. They’re sincere, but carefully so.

“Maybe,” Jake says, trying to bite back a smile. He lets Nate fondle his hand a bit, checking for permanent damage. It almost tickles. “Maybe I gotta be so you’ll actually listen to me.”

“I was listening,” Nate answers, his voice still turned down too low, tucked in against his chest like. “You’re saying you think we should run.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re thinking we should say screw everything and….” Nate’s eyes flick up to Jake’s for a second and hold them. He’s got them baby blues you wanna go swimming in. Nate sighs and returns to admiring Jake’s hand instead. “And you wanna try our luck colonizing somewhere Off World where they don’t even know our credentials or ID numbers, huh? And do what? Garden for the zillionaires?”

“ _Exactly._ Ow!”

“Yep, see? You broke that one.” He gently thumbs the area, just below the base knuckle of Jake’s middle finger. It’s red. It hurts.

“It ain’t broken. Just bruised.”

“Uh-huh. Sure.” But Nate leans in and places his slightly chapped lips to Jake’s skin. It’s dry, brief. He’d feel like a plain gutter spunk idiot for saying this, if he ever said it allowed, but…it’s breathtaking. “You should be more careful.”

“’S’pose. I mean…you got us a room and all….”

“Should’ve done it sooner, too.” Nate slides his lips up Jake’s wrist, at the deep purple veins just under his skin. “You really know how to drive a man into a mattress, huh?”

“Better on your back than a brick wall?”

Nate laughs and his breath is all hot and moist on Jake’s skin. He feels prickly weird, but in a good way. Better even as Nate works his way up, the fuckin’ romantic, his hand snaking to Jake’s belt like he thinks he’s being all covert about it, like it’d even be that hard to undo all the dressing he just got done with.

“Nate, mate. We can’t.”

“I mean, we could.”

“No, I mean. I mean, they’re gonna come knocking soon.”

“I paid them for the full hour.” Nate doesn’t even check the time. “We’ve got another thirteen minutes.”

“And what, pray tell,” Jake starts, combing his fingers through Nate’s sweat-slicked hair, “do you think you can accomplish with thirteen minutes?”

There’s already a little jerk and clatter from Jake’s belt. He feels a hot line pulse down from his chest, molten desire twisting him up and he opens his mouth, panting once towards the ceiling.

“Nate,” he breathes.

“Mmhmm?”

“Nate. Seriously.”

“I am serious.” Nate frees him from his cute little briefs, the band pressing a line underneath and he tightens his hold in Nate’s hair just as he hears the wet kiss of his mouth opening. “You’re always saying how serious I am. This okay?” His tongue peeks out and soon his whole mouth is wrapped around Jake, warm and slick and welcoming.

“Nate, love. They’re gonna come soon.”

Nate pulls off, almost laughing too soon, the sound all muffled.

“So’re you, if you shut up for a second.”

He’s so fucking cute when he wants to be. Cheeky bastard.

“You picked that up from me, y’know.”

“I know,” Nate says softer, kinder, and finally looks up. “I know I did. And I know.”

“You—”

Instead of explaining that he’s _been_ listening. That Jake’s not the only source on the street about the sudden mobilization of replicants. That something _big_ is happening out there and it’s got the air charged and primed and ready to ignite. Instead of explaining the terrible fear in his guts that his whole life is going to turn over and he’s soon going to see himself on the losing team. That he’s going to lose _this._ That he will soon learn what he’s truly lost at the precinct. Instead of all that, Nate slides himself back down on Jake’s erection and falls into the moment. Let Jake grip his hair. Let Jake moan and get harder and shake and curse and bite his lip ‘til it’s bruised. Let them enjoy a time of pleasure instead of saying goodbye. Let them come.

\---

The glasses clink together, tossed with little care on the makeshift bar. It would be easy to imagine technicians, pilots, hell, even replicant Jaeger pilots coming up to the metal slab in the cafeteria with contraband drinks lined up between elbows. A short time of comradery amongst the staff.

There is no ice. It’s a desert and nobody is wasting time trying to make _ice_ out here. A burnt honey liquid with the aroma of ash and engine fuel sloshes against the glass, threatening to spill out. Officer Pentecost— _former_ Officer Pentecost, he is reminded, several times in fact—does not care for grace, precision, or formality when it comes to sharing what he claims passed as whiskey at some point. Wasn’t the idea that the stuff got _better_ with age?

Stacker takes the glass closest to him and slides it towards Newt, who doesn’t bother to pretend to catch it. Hermann does, in his place, and holds both glasses close, like he did in their apartment when they wanted to “share” a drink.

“What’s your name, son?” Stacker asks without looking at them.

Hermann pauses long enough to look at Newt, then back again. “Officer H-G-one—”

“No.” His voice is commanding, filling the cafeteria without having to actually shout. “That’s a serial number. What’s your _name_.”

He feels oddly hot, just underneath his jaw. He supposes blushing is an option, but one that he rarely has to use. The name feels important. For Newt. From Newt. Something as sacred as their claimed marriage. Something that they crafted _together_ and does not require outside stimuli or acknowledgement. Still, he supposes he could share this.

“Hermann,” he finally answers. “This is Newt. Or, uh, Newton.”

“ _You_ can call me Newt,” Newt says pointedly. The extra syllables that Hermann’s added _aren’t_ for someone else, it seems. Newt is comfortable with who he is. What he is. He does not need Stacker sharing Hermann’s name for him.

“Hermann? Newt? 3а здоровЬе.”

Stacker lifts a third glass, the whiskey swirling a ring around the middle. Before he swallows, he dumps some on the ground and the mongrel dog from before pads over silently and begins licking off the floor. Hermann is curious about the creature, but remembers some long-forgotten custom of theirs that _people_ don’t speak before they’ve had their drink after someone has cheered them. He taps his two glasses together and mutters, “n’zdrovia,” under his breath before they take a sip, two for Hermann from each glass while Newt watches.

“Russian?” Newt asks as Hermann discretely winces into the crook of his elbow.

“I worked with a couple of their teams before. The Jaeger Pilots,” Stacker says, laying particular emphasis on the title. “You’ll pick up a habit or two.”

“Especially when they help deliver a child of yours,” Hermann says, his chin tucked in towards his shoulder, half expecting to be punched for the comment.

There is no punch. There’s another gulp from Stacker, the bottle set heavily on the metal surface, and then a pistol laid out between them. Stacker keeps his fingers on the grip, resting. Ready. Confident. This man’s records indicate he retired over one-hundred-and-fifty rogue replicants during his time. An impressive number even by today’s standards, after Gottlieb upped the productions and the streets were flooded with them to fill some unsaid gap in the population. The very point of his being is very real and possible death to Hermann’s. Or life.

A mercy, perhaps, whichever way he chooses.

Hermann ignores the gun. He sets Newt’s glass down in front of him and twists it back and forth, back and forth, just as Newt would when he wanted to fidget. Or perhaps Hermann wanted to fidget and Newt would pretend for him, letting his hand ghost over the top of Hermann’s while they read together on the couch, tucked away, momentarily nobodies with nothing to prove and the quiet assurance of each other’s imperfect company.

The thought is buried as Hermann’s hand stills.

“What was your relationship with the Kaidonovskys?”

“Which one did you take down?”

“Alexis.”

“Ah,” Stacker says, raising his glass again, a fragment of an inch away from his lip. “Well. Then you got the easier one.”

“He nearly took my head off,” Hermann says with a little twist of a smile.

“Nearly.” Stacker muses into his drink and laughs once. It jostles his impressive frame. “Like I said….”

“And the child?” Newt presses.

Stacker eyes him, not like someone who is viewing a simple AI program, which Newt is absolutely not, but like someone who is taking another man seriously. His lip twitches, nearly a sneer, and he finally looks back into his drink.

“What child?”

Newt makes a little high-pitched gravelly sound as he taps Hermann’s ring finger. He’s about to protest, about to say something wildly accusatory, and Hermann turns to him, attempting a hushed conversation.

“No, no, man. This is—”

“Darling.”

“Bullshit! He knows what—”

“Yes, I know, but you shouldn’t—”

“Dude, just _show_ it to him. He can’t deny it! Or he’s a fucking _moron_ if he does.”

“Really.”

“ _Moron!_ ”

Stacker clears his throat. He looks…amused. A little finger wag for both of them. Something that says, _What’s up with the lover’s quarrel, boys?_ Hermann thins his mouth and plunges his hand into his pocket. It is a gesture to close himself off, but he accidentally brushes the little figurine and pulls it out, placing it on the counter between them. It stands for a scant moment before the uneven feet make it wobble and tip and clack down against the barrel of Stacker’s pistol. He flinches back like the thing is a scorpion that Hermann has been keeping in his pocket.

Hermann reaches into his other pocket and frowns over to Newt. “I left the bloody shoes at home.”

“What?”

But Stacker carefully reaches out and picks up the wooden jaeger carving, turning it over slowly in his hand. He bounces it in his palm, testing the weight of it, before he closes his fist carefully over the body.

“We found Rachael’s remains,” Hermann explains gently. Stacker’s face is placid, unreadable, but there’s a slight shimmer to his eyes. “Beneath the tree. We know she died during childbirth. And I’ve put it together that Alexis must have helped deliver her.” Stacker clears his throat again but says nothing. “And we found the archival records of your interview with her. We just….” Hermann hesitates, tapping the bar lightly with his fingers. “We just don’t know what happened with the child.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“At all?”

“Not much long after I made this,” he says and holds up the jaeger toy. “A parting gift, you might say.”

“So. You just…you left?”

“We were being _hunted_ ,” Stacker says, spitting the final word, his anger and frustration starting to break through. “They wanted us _dead_. Eventually, it became too much to stick together. We could go into hiding for a time, but after Rachael…. I was a target. Large enough to scatter the trail. I changed the records of the birth, I organized Sasha’s disappearance. Even if Hansen kept his word, they could still find me, so I left.” He set the toy back on the counter, his hand steady and flat. “Sometimes, to love someone, you _have_ to leave.”

Stacker stands like he is going to storm off when one of the alarm widgets flashes over Newt’s head. He flinches away from it before expanding the view. Three red dots light up from the police drone’s interface, heading in quickly from the south.

“You were followed?” Stacker’s already up from the bar, glass shattering.

“No,” Hermann says, and Newt expands the drone’s camera view to show three approaching vehicles.

“You were followed,” Stacker corrects, accusatory, and begins to run off towards a hallway at the back of the cafeteria.

The dog—and Hermann still isn’t sure if it’s mechanical or not; so many animals left on earth are and it is incredibly rare to see such a fine-looking specimen, even if it _is_ one of Gottlieb’s mechanical companion models—seems to know a certain drill and takes off running. They are unfazed by the glass or Stacker’s guests, simply following a hand signal beneath the bar that Stacker has given them.

Hermann ensures that Newt’s emanator is securely in his pocket as he pushes away from the bar. He can run. For a short time, he can be fast. As much as it jars his leg, worse yet that his cane was broken before. He grits his teeth and attempts a dead sprint after Stacker, who is headed towards the old hangar where they used to launch both the jaegers and the ships to get Off World.

The idea, it seems, is to get to the defense cannons, prime them, and fire at the approaching vehicles. But those are top-line Wei transports up there just by the sporty red stripe and the way they moved in a tight triangular formation. Stacker has a head start to the hangar, but he can’t possibly get the old cannons up and running in time. Hermann does not bother with the half-jarred door, throwing himself through the concrete. His body vibrates with the impact, but adrenaline keeps him going and he gets right up to Stacker when he sees a familiar red light halo them from above. There is enough time to grab Stacker and brace him to the floor as the first Wei transport opens fire.

\---

The dusty orange air spills into the interior hangar bay like water into a deep cup. Something beautiful in the way in the air swirls around them. The slab of light that makes it through the jagged hole, igniting them in yellows and reds that tear apart the cold blue shadows of before. Something poetic, possibly. Of course, Alice cares for none of this. Aesthetic is a tool, a weapon. Who cares for pretty light in a rotten cave?

She does not bother to cover her mouth. The whole operation is a short in-and-out collection. She will pick up their target, take him home to Dr. Gottlieb, and have herself a nice decontamination shower afterwards. Perhaps another manicure as a personal reward. The solar projection decals are starting to look tarnished and old anyways. She should never look so outdated in front of Dr. Gottlieb.

Three replicants, soldier models, step out of their transports in heavy black uniforms. They rush into the dust with the intel from their scans of where at least one warm body is waiting. Alice steps behind them, her footfall confident and even. She doesn’t even flinch when two shots go off and somebody drops like so much useless biomatter.

_Useless._

I _am obedient._ I _am perfect. I am_ love _._

The very _embodiment_ of—

Another grunt, fistfights in the orange miasma, and gunfire as the second soldier is dropped. Alice continues her march into the dust, internally rolling her eyes.

 _I am_ obedient. _I am_ **perfect _._** _I am **love**_.

A hand appears to her left and she catches it, grabbing Officer H’s elbow and flipping him back to the dirty floor where he belongs. The concrete floor buckles and shatters beneath him, leaving a crater to rest in. He huffs once, accidental, but his eyes are sharp and hooked onto her face. She kicks and connects with his nose, then again to his ribs. He rolls, not before he takes her ankle. The nerve that he could attempt to get her off her feet. She smiles and jabs him twice, the ribs, the arm. A kick to his hip. He rolls from the impact and finally lets out a shout as something shakes loose from his person.

Alice runs over and grabs the back of his head. One of her knees is firmly in the middle of his back, so he has to arch to look at her. And she makes him, of course. Mongrels should look where they are told to.

“ _Bad_ dog,” she says through a sharp smile.

“Let go of him!”

There’s a flash of white and blue in the orange dust. Alice pauses, glancing up, with enough time to lift her hand to cover her eyes as something swings down collide with her. Her fingernails zap painfully, the manicure with the hologram software sparking, and she clenches her smoking fist by her side.

“Oh?” She laughs as the modified NeWT stands over Officer H. His heavily tattooed arms—all lightning white patterns now—are caged around him. Like he could actually _protect_ him. “Still a loyal patron, I see.”  
  
“D-on’t.”

She wrenches his back higher and the NeWT projection swings at her again. Alice ducks pointlessly. Perhaps not _pointlessly_. The projection had somehow singed her manicure. It was a remarkable adaptation, whatever they had done to it. If she could—

There.

Alice lets go of Officer H and dives towards the rubble. They must think she’s running. They must think a hologram can be a threat enough to get her to back off, because the NeWT system doesn’t give chase and Officer H doesn’t stupidly try to get up again. He’s curled on his side, his left hand hovering as that NeWT wraps their hand uselessly around H’s. Alice smiles and snags the emanator off the ground.

“You’ve done a lot of modifications on our system,” she says. Two pairs of eyes snap to her as she smiles, fixing her hair. “We really should bring this in and run diagnostics on it.” Her thumb presses hard on the volume. “Or.”

“Fuck. Herms, I lov—”

The voice simulation is completely muted, the program frantically miming at Officer H on the ground. He struggles to face her, reaching. He’s a mess with that broken nose. Ugly, pathetic thing. Her thumb presses harder and the projection suddenly disappears. Perhaps she broke one of the relays inside. Either way, they both know that the emanator is the only thing holding the program anymore, since his home console was torn apart—frustrating, because she had been using it to track him earlier and she had to have that whole messy affair with the lieutenant to find him again.

And now?

Pentecost is out cold when she goes to him, one of the soldier replicants holding his guts together nearby. At least they got him knocked out. That goose-egg on his temple will not be a pretty sight later. She enjoys the thought as she hooks his ankle and drags him back to her transport. There’s one other pilot left to fly one of the other Wei transports. She supposes they could fire on the third and leave it a crippled bird, but it seems fairly pointless with only Officer H bleeding on the floor. Give him something like hope that will dwindle and fade, especially now that his companion is gone. She smiles at the little remote after Pentecost is bolted to his seat. Curious thing. She was joking about the diagnostics, but it would be interesting to see what they had done to it. Perhaps it would be useful for their NeWT network. And if he’s gone? If she broke it? Fine. One less thing to worry about.

“I am obedient,” she whispers happily, starting up the lift-off sequence. “I am perfect.” She slides the emanator into a pocket, tapping it at her side, the same hand with her black and ruined fingernails. “I am love.”

\---

_I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you so fucking much. I’m sorry. Don’t lick him, he…well. Least he made it out of this too. I’m sorry._

And then higher.

Higher.

Bouncing off the weak signal. Pick up a stronger one at the very goddamn edge of the drone’s reach.

Higher.

_I’m so sorry. I love you. I love you I love you I love you._

The path is simple. Like following a line of thought fired through synapses at this point. A very fond memory. The little cluster of illegal satellites that are run by some guy named Choi, ping back and forth through the system until, finally, sitting snugly, sharing space with the onboard computer that faces towards the Breach.

The simple fact is that he ran, yes, but not forever. Not forever. Just higher. Out of reach. Towards the Breach.

He can’t cry. He _can_ cry, because Hermann helped him map out emotional responses, but he doesn’t have a face to pretend anymore. He can’t even blink. He exists. But he’s nothing more than a lidless eye and the memories he saved when he ran. He’s watching with the same mindless tenacity as the onboard computer. Waiting. Watching. Waiting. For them to come again?

Part of him, cruel and stupid and incorrect and almost, well, human…. Part of him wants to them to. Let them come. Wouldn’t that be wild again? Not even up here, where the replicants can fight them off for some forced war for humanity, this weird form of servitude carried out now by Gottlieb and the PPDC before him. No. Let them come to Earth. Let it happen to someone like that crazy lady Alice. Let them come for all the useless, all the cruel, all the violent and unworthy. Let them come. And he and Hermann can fly off and live somewhere together until the end, somewhere nobody can find them.

Can he even get back?

Does it matter?

Does it matter that a monitor nearby running code keeps skipping, keeps printing out that secret whisper:

_I’m so sorry. I love you so much._


	16. Real Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stacker is taken back to the city to meet Dr. Gottlieb.
> 
> Officer H is recovering from the attack with Vanessa and Jake finding him in the Shatterdome. And someone has found a dog.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hermann absolutely has a concussion, so his thoughts are not quite coherent. Hope that's okay!

_The soil is sour._

He thinks he remembers that line from one of those old movies he caught on the Shatterdome’s hologram. Somehow he got a black and white version. Retro. The file was labeled “Blood and Chrome,” which isn’t his usual go-to choice of film, but he stopped being picky a _long_ time ago.

_The soil is sour._

And it is.

And it has been.

And maybe? Maybe it always will be.

Everybody’s going off planet these days just to get away from it. Gave up on Earth. He figures he’ll be here till the end, but, well, where he’s headed now? Maybe that’s coming up sooner than he anticipated.

Stacker stays still and silent in the surprisingly comfortable chair. It doesn’t matter the lumbar support or the leather or the cushions or anything. Wei transports are smooth and agile, and he has to say a small thanks to the design team for reinforcing the main cabin with Flexglas windows. It creates a bubble that he can glance out of without having to move. And he doesn’t.

Christ, but his head’s splitting. Stop looking around. Except, really, Stacker can’t help himself. Better to look and know than remain in the dark.

The interior is faux pristine. It’s white and sterile, silver steel with sleek lines. He’s tracked mud onto the carpet. He _hopes_ he’s tracked mud onto the carpet. Stacker shifts a little and lets his bloody nose continue to leak onto his shoulder. Maybe it’ll stain the seats. Maybe it’ll drip to the floor. He hopes it will.

He hopes Dog will be alright.

He hopes they just kill him. They don’t try pussyfooting around the whole thing and drag out some unknowable secret to finish their war or _start_ their war or who even gives a fuck. He has nothing now. The friends he’s made over the years are likely dead by their hands. Rachael died a long time ago and he’s learned to view the world through the quiet and the numb. The child…it doesn’t matter.

The diseased earth speeds underneath them, dragging him silent back to the city that should’ve chewed him to dust.

“We’ll be visiting Dr. Gottlieb today,” the woman says ahead of him. Her voice is also faux pristine. Sterile. Like the old replicants, he might think, if he were younger and stupid and hadn’t learned that even the old models had something like feeling. Buried and boiled down, but they still felt something. Yes, they used the Voight-Kampff to register emotional responses, but replicants are just…well. They still feel. That’s all. And this one? This one must feel something like a burning rage sitting like a hot coal in her stomach. She’s a killer. It’d be in their best interest for a blade runner to take her down.

And he’s a blade runner, isn’t he? While his hearts still beating?

“ _Retired,” Hansen repeats back to him, nodding. Like he got a good deal out of this before he picks up Rachael and they try their hand at running. How long will he have to keep running? Forever? Forever’s a_ long _time._

_“That’s right,” Stacker had answered. It’s raining. He remembers it’s always raining, but this is hard, dark, heavy rain. This is rain that looks like smoke. Or ice. It’s the kind that buries into the bones and he remembers it forever._

A big splat of water hits the windshield in front of him now. Stacker doesn’t even blink, but it’s a precursor to what’s ahead. Just another storm on another day in LA.

“You got any water?” Stacker asks just because. He folds his hands neatly in the handcuffs. His voice is quiet.

“To your left there,” the woman answers politely over her shoulder.

Stacker looks. He drops his eyes to the heavy reinforced bar attached between his wrists and ankles. No chance he could reach over to the little wood—faux wood, of course—panel and open it to get the water. He’d look stupid to try. It’s a trap, just like everything else, and Stacker lets his painfully heavy eyes slide shut. They feel crummy with dust. He’s probably caked in soil. In dust. And when he rolls his tongue, well, he notices it. It’s quite sour, isn’t it? Earthy and spoiled and, yeah, a little sour.

“Dr. Gottlieb is very interested in you, Mr. Pentecost. You’ve been the center of quit the conversation, I must say. I’m glad we could get you to cooperate now. With you being so…agreeable.”

“Don’t mistake my calm demeanor,” Stacker says. He wouldd have shouted, but his head’s an angry, achy mess and he has decided it’s best to rest. For now.

There’s another fat drop of water on the window, snaking down to meet the first. It’s consumed into the first, waiting a moment before it slides down the rest of the plane of the window. Lost. Gone. Then more come. Full rain. It’s always raining….

Rain’s probably sour too…..

\---

Newt.

_“Get him up. Right there.” Hands close around body parts. An arm. A leg. The other…pulls back. More voices further away that don’t form words, just impressions. A sort’ve stifled reverence. Or fear. “Mind that spot there.”_

_“Something’s wrong with…eugh. What’s that?”_

_“Think he broke his nose?”_

_“Shit.”_

_“Can he hear us?”_

_More noises. Further away. Something drops and thuds and it would be easy to imagine it being a body. Who’s body? What’s a body?_

_“Oi? Can you hear us?”_

_There’s no sense of who or where or why they’re speaking. They just are, and it’s coming in through the strain of darkness, milk and oil, rust and flour._

_Rust and flour._

_R_

_U_

_S_

_T._

_This is not conducive to rest. Better than rest, this is not conducive to bleeding out and dying on the floor. That would be nice. Too bad there’s no mortal wound to speak of, just the bumps and bruises and the breaking heart._

_Uncomfortable._

_Better to sink deeper, then. They’re being so handsy. So loud._

_There’s a floating sensation. Is it fair to wish to be back down? Go back down. Why are they all making webs around flesh or strings around meat or what are they doing and now lifting upwards? It’s too much. What is that? Is that a foot? Is that fingers? Socks? A soiled sweater? A ring? What is that? Too many pieces, really, to keep track. Replicants are just parts grown together. Humans too, if you think about it. If you chase that r…._

_Remember that gravity works. Something’s slipping and someone else presses in to take their place. If it could pull a little harder. If density increased and sucked through the hole ripped through the abdomen. Threading a needle only to tack it back to the soil. The earth. Reality, perhaps. Nothings real. Everything is too real and it would be better if it wasn’t. It would be better to be back on the ground._

_Then?_

_Back on the ground._

_Back on something hard enough that, even with eyes closed, through milk and oil, rust and flour—rust and f l o u r—it’s the ground. That is the ground._

_“Over here!”_

_“Shut up, -- -- --.”_

_“One more. C’mon, get ‘im up.”_

Newton.

 _There’s no point to going back. There’s no point in waking up. It hurts. Does it matter if it is a physical pain? There’s plenty to make up for the fact that what this is, now, is deep in his soul. He’s_ gone _. That woman_ broke _him. He’s as good as dead._

_“Yeah, right there. Alright. Real quick and one-two-three and—!”_

_Well._

_They reset the nose._

_Stars take up the black blanket and its less poetic imagery and more pain receptors igniting. That works just as well as gravity, probably. Possibly. Dragged away from the formless void and into a body that is very much not happy. Then featherlight touches and smoothing some plaster over that bit and alright. Alright. Alright._

Love.

_Alright._

_“Alright.” Oh, they’re speaking so softly, so gently. Their touch is muted through the dark and the plaster on the nose and maybe, sinking down here, it’s okay to pretend those are Newt’s hands again. “Alright. It’s alright. Don’t cry.”_

Alright.

\---

They’re lucky to have found him. Vanessa lets Hermann’s head rest in her lap, smoothing away the tears that keep leaking out of the corner of his eyes. His lips move and he’s thinking _something_ in there. But, yes. She can understand. He’s not ready to come out yet.

“Alright,” she whispers softly, smiling a little to herself when she sees Officer H almost mouth the word back to her. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“He’ll be alright?”

The voice behind her is old. First generation to have their open-ended lifespans included in the DNA soup at conception. What an odd thought. What a true fact of who they are. Vanessa pushes away the contemplation and focuses on Officer H laid out on the hard metal table in front of her. She could have sat on a bench, but it seemed easier to climb up on the table in front of him and pillow his head in her lap. Easier to fix his broken nose this way.

“I’m sure he will be,” Vanessa answers without looking up. “He’s gonna have a hell of a headache. Concussion for sure.”

“We need to know what Gottlieb’s people did with the child’s father.”

“Took him,” Vanessa answers, miffed by the statement. It’s obvious. They know _exactly_ what happened here. Gottlieb’s people crashed into the shatterdome, attacked them, took Pentecost, and left. End of story. She thinks again, after finding Officer H in the crater in the floor, that he looks so lonely without that AI program hovering over him. There’s no way he would have parted with his emanator or with his unique NEwT. She has to guess the worst.

Maybe that’s why he’s fighting coming up, too.

“Yes. They took him”

Freysa sighs as she sits next to Vanessa, option for the bench instead of the table as well. One thin hand nearly touches her leg and she almost pulls away from it. It’s strange. Replicants are rarely given the opportunity to meet old age. Freysa wears it well, obviously, but it’s still almost frightening, in a way. A beautiful weathered face, striking for what it was and what it is now that her left eye has been carved clean from her skull. Her hair is still dark, pulled tight into a bun. Her clothes are loose, practical, warm. She herself is practical, warm. In a way. In a way unsettling, too. She invokes some primal thought all the replicants Vanessa’s age think when they meet older models.

It’s unnatural to grow naturally old. For them.

“I suppose. We put our faith in Pentecost,” she says, her accent thick, striking harder on certain constantans than Vanessa would when she speaks. “He is a good man.”

“Yeah? You were there. Weren’t you?”

“I was,” Freysa says through another sigh, settling in beside Vanessa and Officer H on the hard bench. “I was there when the child was born. And I will be here as long as I can to protect him.”

They both look down at Officer H’s miserable form. One of Freysa’s hands comes up and covers Vanessa’s, letting it rest there against Officer H’s cheek.

“All…right,” he moans, pathetic and thin and quiet.

“Yeah,” Vanessa answers him in the same gentle tone. He’s gonna have to wake up soon. They need to talk. But, for now? Sure. For now, it’s alright.

\---

There’s way more people than the last time they met up. Not often the entire force of replicants who are ready to start something of a resistance against humanity come together like a congregation or some shit. It’d be dangerous to meet in large numbers. Resistances and changes are made by small, sneaky groups. That’s what Jake’s thought. With all his false memories as a child. Hiding in the dark, muddy faces whispering “you’re gonna change the world.”

But, here they are. Nearly everyone from the Hangar and from their little resistance group come together in this shithole shatterdome. Means there’s less room to spread out and breathe, though the locale lends itself to sneaking off and exploring. Freysa doesn’t want them wandering, but Jake’s got shit service here and he wraps his face up before he heads out towards the limits of their shelter. Let everyone else take care of that poor bastard lying on the metal caf table. Jake did his part, yeah? He’s here. He doesn’t _want_ to be here, and is making his way to leaving, thank you, if only he could get Nessa to come with him. Another replicant reaches for him, snags his shoulder, and lifts their chin in either greeting or asking a question or something.

“Going out for a smoke,” Jake answers with an easy smile.

“Reyes hasn’t finished dismantling the scanner,” the replicant says.

“Yeah? Then I won’t step outside.”

“This is serious.”

“So ‘m I, mate. Look, I won’t let any patrols get a scan. I just need some air.”

“Air’s poison, even for us.”

“I’m not _stupid._ ”

Jake twists enough to get his shoulder loose. None of them grab him too hard. Any time they get close, they’ve all got these dainty hands all a sudden, yeah? These soft eyes and careful words. They make a wall between him and everyone and he just wants to get two bars on his fucking cell so he can check for messages.

“Be careful.”

“Yeah, be careful,” Jake repeats back and flaps a hand by his ear, shooing away the sentiment. He scuffs along the grated floor, kicking up little elegant plumes of red dust. Jake stares at them, at his feet, at the floor, at the dust. “Be careful,” he whispers again, quieter, and trudges further out.

Three more replicants take up his time before he finds a door they hadn’t checked yet. There’s tracks on the floor, but they ain’t his and they ain’t anybody else from their resistance group. He spots a sliver of burnt orange and shoulders his way through the rusty barrier until he’s standing beneath a heavy awning. Cracked pavement takes up a good portion of real-estate outside with a giant piece of machinery wrinkling the edge there from where it had fallen over.

Jake quickly reaches into his pocket and fists his cellphone, yanking it out all greedy. He thumbs the side, a smile growing at the familiar site of Nate and Jake in the neon city as his screen saver. Nobody’s here to see the smile, so, nobody’s here to intercept his thought. He loves that image. He thinks, quietly, with fragile hope, that he loves Nate too.

Then the phone opens and the screen stays a sort’ve fuzzy idle as it waits for a proper signal. He stares at the little bars blinking in the corner, but they don’t get much. Half a bar…one. Two. No, one.

Nate’s still not texted him back.

Or he has, and Jake can’t get it.

His shoulders sag. He near collapses against the wall, held up by the fabric of his jacket that crinkles near his neck. He wants to sink further. It’s dark over here, the shadow of the setting sun putting them in a nice cold spot with hazy, chemical-thick air. He just stares over at the dead machine at the end whatever this little tarmac is around the building. Wind keeps moving some panel, squeak-screeching every now and again.

So it’s not easy to hear when there’s new footsteps behind him. Almost too late as Jake shoves up from the wall and raises a fist to anybody that’s looking for trouble.

“Hey, I’m not—”

His words die when he spots the little black nose peeking through the door. Sniffing around for someone.

Animals? Animals are dead rare nowadays. They’re all mostly mechanical. Nobody’s got a real dog or a cat or a bird or shit in their lives. Livestock are curated like priceless paintings and meat is mostly grubs. Hell, tell him they haven’t been fed recycled replicants and he’d probably assume they was liars, if he really thought about it. So he’d never _seen_ a dog. Not in nothing that wasn’t, like, a picture book or something. Jake’s not even sure what to think as the door struggles to budge. He reaches out and yanks it loose and a big black mutt steps out.

“Where you come from?” he whispers, enthralled by the beast. It turns and gives him a long look, his tail wagging gently behind him. He’s got a nice thick main or pelt or whatever it is dogs have. Must keep him warm in all this nuclear winter bullshit. His tongues a little speckled and he’s got gray all over his muzzle. He doesn’t bark. Must’ve learned it was no use to bark. “You real?” he asks the dog.

Does it matter?

Is Jake real?

“Real enough,” he says as the dog steps over and licks Jake’s hand. He thinks he wants to pull away from it cause, uh, gross, but it’s also stupid endearing. Something real soft warms up in his chest and he reaches forward and pets the dog. Dog likes a spot just behind his right ear scratched in just the right way and Jake seems to have the touch for it. The dog manages to lick Jake’s forearm, a bit slower, not as wet. “Yeah, alright,” he mutters, gently pushing the dog’s muzzle away. “No more kisses, mate.”

“There you are!” Jake flinches before he looks up to see one of the solider replicants they managed to free take up the space where the door should be. Reyes smiles, but she’s got a little mean look in her eye. “Y’know they’re looking all over for you and what the hell is that?”

“It’s a dog,” Jake says, as surprised by that statement as Reyes is. “Just come up to me a moment ago. Dunno where he came from.”

“One of the old PPDC models?”

“Fuck if I know,” Jake answers and pets down Dog’s back. “He likes me, though.”

“Mm.” She nods and crosses her arms. Jake’s never had much time to interact with her. He sticks with Vanessa for their little extracurricular activities and their shifts at the Hangar. He doesn’t think this Jules Reyes woman even _works_ at the Hangar. Hard enough switching from a soldier gig to a pleasure gig. Like. That’s gotta suck. He thinks. “Yeah, everyone’s looking for the Boy Wonder.”

“That what they callin’ me?” he teases and pushes himself back up.

“No. That’s what they’re calling that guy who got his ass kicked by Alice.” She rolls her eyes. “C’mon. Freysa wants to talk.”

“About what?”

Reyes shrugs and starts back inside. Some answer, huh? He looks over at Dog, shakes his head, and sneers a little.

“Women, ey?”

“I heard that!” Reyes calls from inside, her voice bouncing around the interior. Jake’s eyes widen, and he swallows hard. “Come _on_ , Boy Wonder!”

“That’s a shit nickname,” Jake mutters. He pats his leg, not entirely sure why, but he’s relieved as Dog wags his tail a little harder and makes to follow Jake back into the shatterdome.


	17. Why

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermann is tasked with going after Pentecost to save the Resistance. Does he care? Not really. But he'll do it anyway.
> 
> Pentecost is brought to the PPDC to meet with Dr. Gottlieb and is asked where his fabled child is. Does he care? Not really. But the'll get him to tell them anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have Blade Runner 2049 in my DVD player 9 times out of 10 because I forget a bunch when I'm reading and I got to this part in the movie and was essentially like "why? Does K just go? And agree to do this?" I mean, there's lots of reasons, but he goes back to the city to be sad and when does he decide to do what he does and when does he leave and yadda yadda, lots of questions! 
> 
> So....that's where we are! Figuring out the why! Been a long time anyways. One step closer to the end! I think there's going to be 20 chapters total, based on my timeline, but I'm almost always wrong about that, SO! Hey! We'll keep on trucking!

When Officer H—Hermann.

When Hermann wakes, he turns to his side and throws up a thin stream of watery bile on the table next to him. He drags his hand across his mouth, immediately apologetic, if only in his mind. It is a strange, surreal moment, replacing the quiet warmth of darkness with the dusty reality of a…metal bunker, by the looks of things?

There are…so many.

Things.

Some….

Where is he?

Who –

Who is he?

Someone laughs nearby, not unkindly by any means, not loudly either. Reserved, accidental, commiserating. Commiserating, yes, as they rub his back and help him sit up. Now he is immediately aware of the broken nose and a bit of hasty plaster attached to it to keep the entire universe from exploding out the front like it feels very much like it wants to.

It is unfair the luxury most have when waking up, to be allowed the time to recover from the drug-like stupor of sleep. To be in a bed, even. Hermann. Hermann doesn’t have that luxury. He remembers that awful replicant beating his face into the pavement, dragging Mr. Pentecost away. Snapping – he doesn’t want to think of it. He doesn’t. He closes his eyes and rubs the bruised spot on the side of his head and he pretends, for now, that the quiet is comforting instead of empty and sad.

“Easy, tiger.”

“Tigers. Mm, have been extinct for…some thirty years,” Hermann answers and curls his knees up closer towards his chest.

“Right. Thanks for the history lesson, Officer.”

Hermann glares at his kneecap instead of the oddly familiar figure to his right. It takes a gentle touch, a little nudge, before he takes a canteen and raises it to his lips. Tin-tainted water splashes down his throat. There’s the scent of blood. Of rust. Of radiation mingling within, but he mustn’t care now. None of them can care what the world gives them because, by every right, they have no claim to it. They’re simply created to serve. Isn’t that it? Who’s Hermann serving? What purpose does he have anymore? Can he have a purpose? Without….

“Hermann,” he finally says, handing the canteen back to the woman. She pauses when she retrieves it, their fingertips touching, and he finally, _finally_ looks at her. A softer, gentler creature would cry, he thinks. He feels it, deep down. He’s cried already, while he was sleeping, and he doesn’t know she cradled his head at the time and whispered gently to him. He just knows that right now he can keep his face calm and stoic. It helps mediate the pain of the broken nose. He knows he had his time and he is empty now. It’s easier. It’s lonelier. It’s easier….

“You gave yourself a name?” Vanessa asks with something soft and gentle, just for him. He knows that’s not true. She must use soft and gentle on a number of clients.

“No,” Hermann answers. “No. Newt did.”

“Oh.”

She tries to comfort him again, to rub his hand, but he calmly draws it back and tucks it into his pocket. A nicer way to rebuke any advances, he thinks. Even better to look away, towards the floor.

Or…not a floor.

He’s been sleeping in a cafeteria on a table, remember, and this is certainly an old sturdy table. It could hold a hundred men on it, he thinks, all steel and concrete. Just like the rest of this rotting womb they’re currently hiding in.

“A name is always progress,” someone else says nearby.

Hermann finds himself straightening his spine and putting knuckles to his thighs as an older woman comes towards them. She’s flanked by others in a sort of procession. Her clothes, even, seem monk-like in nature. Sturdy. Practical. _Warm_ , but not _soft_.

He’s reaching. He realizes, a moment later, it’s for his gun, which is still conveniently left strapped to his side, the double-grip pistol issued by the station. Nobody took it from him? That’s got to be a sign of trust. Or stupidity. Or both.

“Let me guess,” the woman starts, and her voice comes out of her like smoke and water. She has a strange accent. They all do, don’t they? “You want me to look up and to the left?”

She does not need to tilt her chin to show off the gaping hole where her left eye is missing. He wonders, idly, who plucked it for her. A souvenir or a survival tactic?

Hermann’s hand stays on his gun. He doesn’t tense further, so that might the best they can offer each other in this strange stalemate.

“This is Freysa,” Vanessa explains, still bold enough to curl fingers around Hermann’s wrist. He leans inches away. Not quickly, but enough. She lets him go. “She wants to meet you. We’re not going to hurt you, Officer. You can trust us.”

“Hermann.” The argument feels pointless, something stinging in his chest. “This is the Resistance,” Hermann says and looks around at all the faces. Battle-hardened. Life-hardened. They press in as the silent congregation. He has to guess they’re all replicants, down to the last one, but they are too many to be absolutely certain. “I…recognize you.”

“She fought with the Kaidonovsky’s in the war against the Breach,” Vanessa says for Freysa, tasked as a talking head without any need or provocation.

“Kaidonovsky,” Hermann repeats. His mind—oh, it aches, it aches, swimming together—finally settles on it. He saw this woman’s profile in the list sent to him to retire from Mako. “Did you…help? With the child?”

Something goes through the crowd. Hermann isn’t sure if it is good or bad. Understanding can be a dangerous thing.

“I was there,” Freysa says simply. She reaches into her pocket and Hermann thinks about his weapon again. Is he faster? Usually, yes, but he’s not in his best shape. He feels like he hasn’t been in his best shape in months. Weeks. _Years_. “I was there when the child was born. I held him up in the light, dressed him in blue, gave him his first treat. I was there. For the miracle.”

Again, that uncomfortable _something_ in the crowd. Hermann realizes finally that it’s hope. Painful and fragile and young. But hope, nonetheless.

A picture swims in front of Hermann’s face. He struggles to lean forward, to reach for it, only to find his cane touching his knee. He glances over and takes the cane instead. He could not remember if it had been destroyed, but the fact that it is back in his hand means someone took the time to find it, repair it. It’s a comfort that makes his breath shake when he grips it. He feels steady when he finally takes the picture from Freysa’s thin hand.

There is the now familiar dead tree outside Alexis Kaidonovsky’s farm. Freysa stands beside the formidable Russian pair, a small baby swaddled in their arms. The sun hits them all wrong, cast in garish shadows. None of them are used to taking pictures. None of them have the practice of documenting photographic evidence of “the miracle,” but it seemed prudent at the time to do so.

“A baby born,” Freysa says. That painful hope stains her voice too, but she wields it with anger, with danger, with steel. “Do you know what this means? If a baby can come from one of us?”

“More human than human,” Vanessa supplies. The words echo about them, quiet mantras, quiet prayers.

“The tide is coming,” Freysa says as Hermann hands the picture back to her. “But they’ve taken Pentecost and they will take him to Gottlieb. Gottlieb will know about us. About me. About the child. He cannot know of us. You cannot let that happen. _You_ must kill Pentecost. Stop them from finding any of this out. Give us the time we need to take the child and bring him to the light. To lead us to our next evolution.”

The command comes plainly from this replicant who was a jaeger pilot soldier. She’s known order all her life. He almost finds himself bending to it out of habit.

It would be so easy….

Hermann could go for more water, even if it tastes like rust. They all could, probably, so he doesn’t ask. He’d never think to want for water, another scarce and tainted resource of their dying planet. He drinks sludge and alcohol and grease from noodles instead. Newt might remind him to hydrate, sometimes. He’d do it with a laugh and hold up a glass and call him “dude.”

“Why?” he finally asks. Croaks, more accurately.

Instead of being appalled or angry that Hermann asks this, something kind in Freysa melts to the surface, relaxing her shoulders, her thin but painfully tight fists.

“Exactly.”

He stutters on her answer, with frowns, with furrowed brow, with tilted head that chases her movements through the silent crowd. She finds someone in paltry garb, plastic sheeting and a neon collar around his neck. He’s big. Too big to work at the Hangar with the others, but the whole point is lying on the records to keep this unit of replicants together, this Resistance against Humanity. The tall replicant gently removes the collar at Freysa’s silent request. The soldier chip scar is obvious. Even Vanessa has that one. The pale jagged line across his throat is something else entirely.

“They think they can ask us to kill ourselves. They think they’ve programmed us to perfect obedience. They think it is in our DNA and forget our souls are bound there too.” She pats his arm and leaves him to button himself back up. “A man makes a demonstration of the replicant loyalty by having them take a piece of glass to their throat and claims their baseline tests hold all the answers. But you and I. We know different, yes?”

 _More human than human_.

Hermann hears the words whisper around them again. He wonders if he should find the chanting comforting? But, instead, finds only an oily dread take up some hollow place in his chest.

Pentecost was running. He showed them how to run. He made a child with a woman he loved and he thought he was protecting them by leaving, by exiling himself in this cold desert. Pentecost, just a man, and he might be heading in for torture and they still want him dead.

 _Why_?

The chanting continues, and he’s not entirely sure if he’s repeating it in his own head, in this fevered pitch of euphoria, or if they are. He holds his cane and extends a hand blindly to his side, imagines the faint light of Newt’s hand brushing his own and….

His fist closes. He returns it to his pocket, head bowed in a facsimile of prayer. It doesn’t matter. “Why” might be freeing, might be telling of who they have become, might be breaking all their baselines and their programming or whatever Dr. Gottlieb believes his line of replicant programming should be, but, ultimately, it does not matter. He decides to do this on the simple merit that it just might kill him.

As they say, what’s nobler than dying for a cause?

\---

He can’t understand why so many mobilized out here. It feels like the start of their great big bloody war they want and, frankly, they can have it for all Jake cares. He’s missed most of Freysa’s little pep-talk to that skin job, slinking back when they start their _more human than human_ shit. Never sat right with him. He knows what he’s supposed to be. He’s a replicant. That ain’t human. That’s bioengineered what-have-yous. What-have-hims. Straight from the catalogue, if rich people get catalogues when they put in an order with Gottlieb at the PPDC. Jake bets his splash page looks _tight_.

The crowd disperses and Jake fumbles for the edge, patting Dog and getting him out from underfoot. Not that Dog’s slow or nothing, considering he’s survived out here with some guy and his collection of half-encrypted movies and little old jaeger model wooden figurines scattered on shelves like missing puzzle pieces. Might fetch him a healthy price. Jake snags one and slips it into his pocket, tucked in next to his cell phone. He thinks he should’ve brought something a little more opaque for wear, but they were in a rush, weren’t they?

“Ness!”

Vanessa’s over with that slug-head, the soldier model. They must have shifted to each other when the Big Speech or Whatever from Freysa comes to a close and the blade runner sits on his table and thinks his thoughts. It’s just him and Freysa now, talking quieter, like friends. Or like a general to her shoulder, more like. He suspects.

Doesn’t matter.

Doesn’t matter that Nessa has a friend. Jake’s a friend. They can all be friends. This one. Reyes, right? The two of them look like peas in the proverbial pod, Ness a good four inches over Reyes so she has to tilt her head down to talk to her in a facsimile of benign gossip. They’re laughing. Jake wonders, briefly, if it’s about him, and squares his shoulders before Vanessa takes Reyes’ hand and laughs harder, easier.

“There you are,” Vanessa says, pushing through a few wall-types to get to him. Her eyes track down and she laughs again, not as nice. Surprised. “What’s that?”

“It’s Dog,” he answers, because, obviously.

“Is it real?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“Why’s it following you, then?”

Jake shrugs, kneeling knightly-like next to the beast, and earns and little nudge, wagging tail, soft fur against his skin.

“Was it Pentecost’s?” Vanessa whispers to Reyes, who smiles, just not with her eyes, her nose crinkling towards the center. It’s got pity or something related painted all over her face and Jake takes the time to push his own face into Dog because that’s much better.

“Like father like son,” she answers back behind her hand, barely covering the mumbling response. It’s a weird joke to make in that he can’t see the punchline.

“What’s going on with the Blade Runner?” he tries instead. “Are we bringing him into the group or what?”

“Hermann?” Vanessa and Reyes glance back to see the Blade Runner speaking quietly with Freysa. He doesn’t nod. He barely blinks. No questions asked until he finally points over at the transport left behind and Jake suddenly understands that Hermann is going back to the city. “Solo mission. He’s going to take out Pentecost so they don’t….”

For whatever reason, this is generally where these types of conversations go to die. Nessa falters over her speech, picking and choosing her words carefully. She doesn’t want to say “so they don’t know about the child.” Jake doesn’t even know about the child, really. He knows _of_ it because nobody can keep their damn mouth shut about the idea of this miraculous child they all keep bragging about. He suspects it’s just an idea. They’re all children. They’re all real. They all need to feel Christ-Like and special and he understands it’s shit being a replicant and the whole point of this operation is to make that fair. They’re gonna fight someday. He might even be a part of it. He used to think he might be a big part of it, too. Nessa is. Freysa is. They’re these important women pulling them together as a community, getting them ready. Making the “Resistance.”

But now?

Now he’s annoyed. Now he’s tired. Now he wants to go home. He wants to tell a certain Blade Runner—not this one, ew—that he’s full of all these feelings and shit and he’s tired of the world. He wants out. He wants to be done.

So maybe there’s something big Vanessa and the lot of them are trying to say. There’s something they won’t tell him and it feels like, at this point, it should be obvious. Maybe he’s just been ignoring it for so long.

“Hey.” Reyes snaps her fingers in his face and Jake holts back. “Boy Wonder.”

“Shut it,” Jake answers and swats at her hand. He misses, gets air. “What about us?”

“What _about_ us?” Vanessa repeats.

“I mean, what are we doing? If he…if Hermann or whatever is going back to do whatever…what are we doing?”

“Staying here until we have confirmation.”

“Of?”

“Stacker’s death, I guess,” Vanessa says.

“Why?”

The two laugh again, sharing this _look_. Jake almost bubbles up with rage, this feeling of something missing and secret and shamefully about him that’s been a long time brewing, that’s been dampened by finding someone who hasn’t been part of this weird cluster of Replicant’s since Jake can remember, really remember and not all those fake memory implants from his quote-unquote “childhood.”

Dog sneezes and starts to leave. Jake shouts a shaky “h-hey!” and decides to go after him because these two won’t tell him anything. They won’t share. They don’t trust him. They belittle him. They love him. They hate him. He doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter, and he knows, he knows, he _knows_ there’s a way out of here now. Dog’s given him the first step just by leaving. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

\---

Something trickles down the stone steps, a little plink of sound that gurgles and worms into his mind. Stacker shifts. His head heavy. He doesn’t remember if he was hit again, if he was drugged. When did he fall asleep? Why? He didn’t take the water…did he?

“Ah.”

The voice is rich, is near, is heavy and patient for the sake of pretending to be. It takes a moment to focus here in the strangely dim stone room he finds himself. He’s on a sofa. His hands are bound together with a strip of metal leading to another set of manacles around his ankles. The bruise on his jaw aches and he thinks a few of his teeth are loose, which he prods with his tongue.

“You’re awake.”

There’s too long a pause between all these words. Definitely drugged. Maybe he did take that water after all.

 “Now, I could go on some tired diatribe about angels and heaven and, do believe me, Mr. Pentecost, I think there is some merit for having saved all of humanity with what we’ve accomplished here, but, ultimately I need you to understand what’s at stake.”

Dr. Gottlieb sits primly on his throne, his seat a sturdy and low-back square of granite plumped up with cushions. Oddly ostentatious, but so is the cathedral he’s built for himself. The PPDC office now stands as one of the largest structures in the world. Where else could they keep archives and create replicants and play God, as he’s insinuating?

“You and I both know this place. Earth. It’s a dying thing.” He touches his collar where a tie or a bowtie might be, currently buttoned tight to the top. It’s hard taking in the whole, so Stacker focuses on the square finger pads and starch collars and half-moon spectacles. He’s dressed like a scholar from an age that was gone long before Stacker was born. “Our goal, you see, is to take to the stars. Yes? We’ve helped conquer planets. We’ve helped alleviate the strain left on this rock by moving people off-planet and by assigning roles to my replicants. Protein farming has been a windfall.”

Oddly bright lips curl upwards with amusement.

“A godsend,” Dr. Gottlieb amends.

Stacker’s not sure if the nausea is a side-effect—and, surely, it is—or if he’s just going to throw up on principle.

Still, Dr. Gottlieb proceeds with the air of a man who is not interrupted without grave consequence to the man who does so.

“And, despite this godsend, I cannot find the means to produce more replicants to continue the efforts of saving mankind.”

“Lotta effort put in then?” Stacker asks, letting his head slide to the right like it wants to and rest against the cushion. “Playing god?”

“Do you know what you are?” Dr. Gottlieb presses.

He’s not sure why. He’s not sure why that’s…upsetting. Stacker looks at the floor, which warps and warbles with the shadows cast from water, of all things. It’s not shadows. It’s light. Th whole thing is so fucking pretentious. He wants to close his eyes and feel the sturdy weight of stone beneath him and know he’s grounded, but he doesn’t even know where he is in relation to the actual earth. Are they deep underground? Are they high up in the tower? Is this an island in a faux sea for Dr. Gottlieb’s amusement?

“You are half of a missing puzzle. There’s always been the lock. I’ve found the key.” Dr. Gottlieb leans back, holding a hand up. That replicant woman, the fierce one who punched that poor sod of a Blade Runner into the floor, she steps closer and holds up the heavy marble recording of Stacker’s old interview with Rachael. A copy of it begins to project against the wall to their left. Not a wall, a curtain of air. A hologram. Stacker must move to see it, would have to lift his head and turn, but doing so seems like an impossible effort. He doesn’t track the flickering lights with his eyes. No, he closes them, and listens to her laugh, tease him, his inability to tease back and knowing, despite that, he was just starting to fall for her.

_May I ask you a personal question?_

_Sure._

_Have you ever retired a human by mistake?_

_No._

_But in your position, that is a risk._

The clip mutes, but if he looks, he can still see the hazy projection of her face there up on the wall. He must look. He must see, again, what’s been painted behind his eyes every night. His head hurts, yeah, his head hurts, and his throats dry, and he swallows anyways as he stares up at her like a religious mural. One of the greats, maybe. The sort that go into a chapel. The sort that—

Heels click on the cold surface, echoing around them.

“You are but one half of it all, Mr. Pentecost, yes? The miracle. I know it’s real. I know it can be done. You see her there and I see how instant your connection. I see it as clear as dreaming. You love her. Did it never occur to you that this is why you were summoned here in the first place? Designed to do nothing short of fall for her then and there? All to make that single… _perfect_ specimen. That is, if you were designed. Love or mathematical precision? Yes? No?”

The steps come closer, louder, and a form breaks through the curtain of the hologram. They’ve dressed her like a doll. Her hair perfect, not a strand out of place, not a speck or spot on her cheek. She walks out reborn. They’ve even put her in the same dress as the recording, when he remembers her fondest in the gray jeans and blouse they’d scavenged, unbuttoned turning into undressed turning into warm breaths and sunlight through stained plastic sheeting in a barely-heated bungalow in the mountains. Safe. Alone. Perfect.

 _Why_?

He can’t breathe.

He can breathe, but he doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t want to, and he does anyways, and he holds his hands together, his throat working hard as he sits up and stares at Rachael.

“With the remains, we were able to make her new,” Dr. Gottlieb says, sounding quite pleased with himself. He glances back and holds up his hand again, like showing off a prized animal in some show. “Bring her back to you. Cooperate with us, Mr. Pentecost. We can make this as painless as possible, if you will just help me locate the child.”

Rachael’s shoulders are stiff in the unfortunately dated get-up. It’s true, they’ve got the make-up, the stockings, the whole thing is right. But she arches an eyebrow and a faint hint of a smile starts to blossom. It’s not the easy laughter near the fireplace. It’s not crying from the untampered joy when they find out she’s pregnant, not yet ready to be afraid. It’s not coy flirting and blatant flirting and petty arguments about the garden that’s keeping them alive or the less petty arguments about the world that will come and destroy them. It’s not finding old jaeger pilots who are done with humanity and war and want to rest their heads, too. Who take them to the farm, who hold Rachael’s hand, who cut her open to save her, and then don’t and a child he doesn’t look at it for fear that if he does, he can’t run and if he can’t run he can’t save it and if he can’t save it than Rachael’s death is nothing. It’s nothing. This thing is nothing.

“Her eyes were green,” Stacker finally says.

This Rachael’s face falls, innocently open and sincere. They got that right, too.

There’s a pause, of course. Dr. Gottlieb occupies it with a sigh and a wave of his hand and the replicant woman, Alice, steps up with a Blade Runner-issue pistol. The grip is dark, the barrel matte, bulky, deadly. The strange suction and pop before the loud explosion rings through and Rachael falls dead to the floor.

Stacker doesn’t flinch this time. It hurts seeing her fall, but he’s already been through this grief. It hurts worse, maybe, from the extended false hope that he could have had her, but he reminds himself it’s not real. It’s not important. It’s picking at an old wound, maybe, at _best_. He doesn’t flinch. He just closes his eyes.

There’s already hands on him, helping him to his feet.

“You think this is the only thing we can do to you,” Dr. Gottlieb says evenly, the anger at his temporary failure pushed deep down. “You think we can torture you. Off-world, we can do so much more. You’re going to tell us where the child is. This is inevitable.”

Alice is leading him out. He almost says goodbye, over his shoulder. Seems like it would be funny to do so, but everything’s heavy and hurts and his goodbye would be more for the dead meat on the floor than for Dr. Gottlieb anyways. He has to wonder, _how long until I’m dead meat too? A man can dream and dream and dream._

_To sleep, perchance to dream. To dream. For in this sleep of death what dreams may come?_

_Do you dream?_

**Author's Note:**

> As always thank you thank you THANK you for reading! Comments and kudos are candy, but just that you made it all the way down here is pretty god-dang sweet!
> 
> Tags will be updated as we get through the chapters, keep an eye out for that!


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